CSE 1100 – Lecture 1

Adapted from Mr. Christopher Muir lecture notes, UWI

A Brief history of computing

A long time ago, in a galaxy…

 Ancient precursors to modern computing
 The Algorithm
 The Beginning of Computing Machinery
 The Evolution of Programming
 Augmenting the Human-Computer Interface
 The Personal Computer
 The Internet
 The First (known) Math/Computing
Device
The Ishango Bone
• Dates back to 20,000BC
• Found in Congo, Africa
• Believed to be a tool for assisting in multiplication,
division, prime numbers and base arithmetic
• CNN News report on Ishango Bone
Ancient Computing

 Humanity has been using computing devices for centuries

 Many ancient cultures built devices to aid them in calculations
 Examples
 The Abacus ~ as early as 2700 BCE Mesopotamia.
 Chinese abacus ~ 200 BCE which allowed more sophisticated calculations
 Antikythera Mechanism ~ 1 BCE, Greece
A is for Algorithm

 Algorithm comes from Al-Khwarizmi,

 an ancient Persian mathematician, astronomer and geographer
 His work on the Indian numerals introduced the decimal positional number
system to the Western world
 Established the basis for innovation in algebra and trigonometry.
 Devised a systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations
 Grandfather of Computer Science??
 The Golden Principle of Al-Khwarizmi

The al-Khwarizmi principle states that all complex problems of science can be solved by five
simple steps:
1. Break down each problem into a number of elemental or ‘atomic’ steps, which cannot
be simplified any further.
2. Second, arrange all the elements or steps of the problem in an order or sequence.
3. Next, find a way to solve each of the elements separately.
4. Then solve each element of the problem, either one at a time or several at a time, but
in the correct order.
5. When all steps are solved, the original problem itself has also been solved.

Al-Khwarizmi used his own principle to solve many major problems of Algebra, Geometry,
Astronomy, and other fields of science.
Ref: http://kenatica.wordpress.com/2007/01/30/the-golden-principle-of-al-khwarizmi-
algorithm/
The Beginnings of Modern Computing
(18th/19th Century)
 Charles Babbage: Invented the Difference Engine and the Analytical
Engine
 Ada Lovelace: Considered to be the first programmer. Worked on
Analytical Engine with Babbage
 She described an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli
Numbers which is considered to be the first specifically tailored for a
computer
 Neither the Difference Engine or the Analytical Engine were ever
completed…
 Until Now - http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/modernsequel/
The First Electronic Computers

 Started being built ~ 1940 - http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/

 World War II accelerated computer research for military purposes
 Complex Number Calculator (CNC)

 Built by Bell Labs in 1940

 Could Add, subtract, divide complex numbers
 Demonstrated at a conference at Darthmouth
College in New Hampshire where he remotely
connected to the CNC via telegraph
 1st demonstration of remote access computing
 Colossus

 Early (special purpose) electronic mainframe

computer
 Designed specifically to break Nazi codes
 Located at Bletchley Park
 Based on work done by Alan Turing
 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-
26015436
Alan Turing

 British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist

 Considered to be the father of Computer Science
 Hero during WW2 for his work in breaking Nazi codes
 Designed specification for stored-program computers
 Pioneer in field of Artificial Intelligence. Turing Test is named after him
 Convicted and discredited for “indecency” when his sexual orientation
became known
 Committed suicide soon after
 60 years later posthumously pardoned and is recognized as one of the
greatest contributors to modern computing
Harvard Mark I (1945)

• General purpose electro-mechanical

computer
• Was used to assist in the complex calculations
for the Manhattan Project
• 55 feet long, 8 feet high, 5 tonnes
• Designed and built by IBM
The Information Age

 4 main phases so far:

 Institutional Computing (1950 - ): large, expensive mainframes used by
governments, universities and industry
 Personal Computing: (1975 - ): smaller, cheaper computers allowed for use in
homes and schools
 Interpersonal Computing (1995 - ): Internet gains popularity due to the web and
people start go online
 Collaborative Computing (2005 - ): More devices are connected to the internet
and users are now encouraged to contribute content eg. Facebook, Wikipedia
 NEXT???
Institutional Computing
Stored-program computers

 All early computers were fixed-program computers. i.e. they were very
restrictive in what they could do (typically mathematic problems)
 Alan Turing defined the basis for stored-program computers (1936-1946).
 These computers had an instruction set (list of things computer could do)
 You could load a series of these instructions (program) to achieve a goal
Manchester “Baby” and UNIVAC 1

1st Stored-program Computer 1st Commercial Computer

Built at University of Manchester Built by Remington-Rand in 1951
First successful run in 1948 Sold to US Census Bureau
Integrated Circuit Computers

 The Integrated Circuit (IC) conceived in 1952 by Geoffrey Dummer

 All components of an electronic circuit completely integrated and
connected without the use of wires and made out of semiconductors
 1st IC built in 1958 out of Germanium as semiconductor by Texas Instruments
 Fairchild Semiconductor released their IC made out of silicon a year later
 The IC paved the way for today’s computing devices
 It allowed computers to be made that were smaller and cheaper than
before
 Led to updates in graphics and Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
 Eventually led to the PC revolution
Time Sharing

 Computers were expensive. Few organizations could afford to own

 Instead people/organizations could lease time on existing computers
 Large central computers connected to dumb terminals
 Terminals were input/output (I/O) devices
Interactive Graphics

 Sketchpad – Developed by Ivan Sutherland at MIT in 1963

 Direct image manipulation
 Demonstrated first screen window with icons, copying
 Could have multiple images and embedded images
 Had a light pen (stylus) as an input device
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB3saviItTI
Augmentation not Automation

"I tell people: look, you can spend all you want on building smart agents and
smart tools…"

"I'd bet that if you then give those to twenty people with no special training,
and if you let me take twenty people and really condition and train them
especially to learn how to harness the tools…"

"The people with the training will always outdo the people for whom the
computers were supposed to do the work."
--- Doug Engelbart
Doug Engelbart

 Founded the Augmentation research Center (ARC) at

Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
 Invented the computer mouse
 Oversaw the development of hypertext, networked
computers and graphical user interfaces
 These concepts were demonstrated in what is now called
“The Mother of all Demos” in 1968
 http://youtu.be/VScVgXM7lQQ
 http://youtu.be/hRYnloqYKGY
 http://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/dougs-1968-demo.html
Personal Computing
The dawn of the PC and GUI
Xerox PARC
 Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) founded in 1970
 Responsible for the prototypes of many of the developments that make up the
Personal Computing era:
 laser printing (1971)
 Ethernet (1973)
 the graphical user interface/desktop (1973)
 PC workstation – The Alto (1973)
 Object Oriented Programming (OOP) – Smalltalk (1972)
 Goal: “The Paperless Office”
 Alan Kay (PARC Researcher): “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”
 Alan Kay video
Xerox Alto

 One of the first personal computers

 Released in 1973
 1st computer to use a desktop metaphor
 One of first to have a mouse-driven GUI
 One of first with Ethernet connections for LAN
 Inspiration for Apple Macintosh and MS Windows
 Alto ad in 1972
The Evolution of Programming
Languages
The Evolution of Programming
Languages
1st Generation Languages

 Programmed in the language of computers – Machine Language

 Date from the beginning of computing
 What is Machine Language?
 Based on binary as early electromechanical computers had switches and
plugs which could be set to an “on” (1) or “off” (0) position
Issues:
 Machine Dependent: “programs” were specific to the particular computer
 Extremely difficult to locate errors or track code changes
2nd Generation Languages

 Assembly Language: symbolic representation of low-level machine code

that could be used for electronic computers (didn’t need to pull plugs/flick
switches anymore)
 From the late 1940s
 Easier to code than machine language due to symbolic nature
 Still machine dependent
3rd Generation Languages

 High level Languages including procedural languages, functional

languages, object oriented languages
 First versions were from 1950s
 First High Level Language designed by “mother of computing” Adm. Grace
Hopper
 Adm. Grace Murray Hopper

 The “mother of computing”

 Designed the first high-level programming languages: MATH-
MATIC and FLOW-MATIC which helped define COBOL in 1959
 Pioneer in the testing of computer systems and is credited with
popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches
 Was the oldest active duty US Naval officer and retired
(involuntarily) as a one-star Admiral at age 79
 Was a consultant for Digital Equipment Corp until her death at 85
3rd Generation Languages

 High level: were closer to natural languages

 Structured: well defined syntax
 Were machine independent: Once written, the code could be reused on a
variety of computers with little to no modifications
 Much more abstracted: programmer didn’t have to deal with a lot of low-
level details
 Support for a variety of data types: Strings, arrays, lists, etc
 Much easier to debug and maintain that previous generations
3rd Generation Languages (Paradigms)

 Procedural Languages: allowed creation of routines that could be called

at anytime within a program. Eg. C, Pascal, COBOL
 Functional Languages: Computation treated as the evaluation of
mathematical functions. Eg. LISP, Scheme
 Object Oriented Languages: introduced the concept that programs could
be made up of “objects” which consisted of “attributes” which described
the object and associated routines known as “methods”. Eg. C++, Java,
Smalltalk
 Dennis Ritchie
 Invented the C programming language (1969-1973)
 Created Unix (along with Ken Thompson) (1973)
 His death was overshadowed by Steve Jobs who passed the week before
 C was used to write Unix, DOS, Windows and the Internet
 Linux, MacOS and Android are all based on Unix
 Received National Medal of Technology for C and Unix with the citation:
“led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking
systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing
American leadership in the Information Age"

“Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but...
if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you'd see his work
everywhere inside”
--- Paul Ceruzzi (Computer Historian)
Adele Goldberg

 Head of PARC Systems Concepts Lab

 Team developed the GUI and Smalltalk
 One of primary developers of Smalltalk
 Smalltalk-80 was first popular OO language and first with GUI programming
 Directly influenced Java, JavaScript, C#, Python, PHP and others
 Adele presents Smalltalk-80
Early Personal Computers

 Apple II (1977)

 IBM XT/AT (1981)

Marc Dean

 Holds three of nine patents for the original IBM PC

 Designed the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus
 This allowed add-on devices to be connected to the motherboard
 This invention put him in National Inventors Hall of Fame
 Designed the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) for the original IBM PC
 Was chief engineer for development of the modern PC
 IBM PC/AT, IBM PS/2
 PCs today still use almost the same configuration as the PS/2
The Apple tour of Xerox PARC

 The Apple II was under pressure from competition

 Steve Jobs got a tour of PARC (with dissent from Adele Goldberg) in
exchange for discounted shares of Apple
 From the tour Apple got access to all of PARCs new technology
 Jobs was especially impressed with the GUI and mouse combination
 Read “The Creation Myth” by Malcolm Gladwell
 Dramatization of the visit from movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”
Apple Lisa (1982)

 Based on the ideas they saw at Xerox

 2nd PC to be sold that used a GUI (Xerox Star was first)
 Lisa was a commercial failure partly due to cost (~USD10,000)
 And partly due to the Macintosh which was released 2 years later
 Apple Lisa ad
Apple Macintosh (1984)

 Priced much more aggressively (~USD2500)

 Upgraded GUI
 Better graphics
 More 3rd party applications
Apple vs. Microsoft

 Microsoft licensed parts of early MacOS to create Windows 1.0

 Apple complained that MS had used more of MacOS than was agreed to
 Apple sued all the way to Supreme Court
 Microsoft won
 Justices decided that look and feel of software could not be patented or
copyrighted
4th Generation Languages

 Very High level languages more abstracted than 3GLs

 Machine independent
 Focus was on Rapid Development and Application Generation
 Goal was to enable programmer for the wider population
Paradigms include
 General Programming eg. IBM Rational (Rose), Ruby, Python, Perl
 Database eg. SQL, Ingres, Informix
 Report Generators eg. Oracle Reports, RPG-II, NATURAL
 Data Manipulation/Analysis eg. R, SPSS, SAS, PL/SQL
 GUI/Screen Builders eg. Oracle Forms, SB+
5th Generation Languages
Rise of the Machines

 Used for Artificial Intelligence primarily

 Very High Level: Greater use of natural language
 Machine Independent
 Constraint driven: Attempts to mimic human thought
 Logic driven: use of logic to express information and make inferences
 Eg. Prolog, OPS5, CLIPS, WolframAlpha
Intelligent Personal Assistants
e.g. with Siri
 Intelligent Personal Assistant for Apple devices
 Developed at SRI (Remember them?)
 Uses speech recognition engine developed by Nuance Communications
(also an SRI spin-off)
 Recognizes speech and then uses multiple data sources to provide results:
 Uses Bing and Yahoo for web search
 Uses Bing Answers and Wolfram Alpha to answer factual queries
 Is tied into other data sources such as Maps, Yelp, weather, etc
 Main competition: Google Now and Microsoft Cortana
What’s next?