Lesson 1

The History of Computers

Topic Objectives

 Define what is computer?

 Discuss the history of computers
 Identify the characteristics of Computer
 Know the origin of computer
 Identify capability of computer in terms of speed
and accuracy
 Distinguish computer from human beings
What are computers?

 The first computers were people! That is,

electronic computers (and the earlier
mechanical computers) were given this
name because they performed the work that
had previously been assigned to people.
"Computer" was originally a job title: it was
used to describe those human beings
(predominantly women) whose job it was to
perform the repetitive calculations required
to compute such things as navigational
tables, tide charts, and planetary positions
for astronomical almanacs.
What are computers?

 Imagine you had a job where hour after hour, day

after day, you were to do nothing but compute
multiplications. Boredom would quickly set in,
leading to carelessness, leading to mistakes. And
even on your best days you wouldn't be producing
answers very fast. Therefore, inventors have been
searching for hundreds of years for a way to
mechanize (that is, find a mechanism that can
perform) this task.
Counting Tables

 Picture of ancient
counting tables
Early computer
operation(people)
Abacus

 The abacus was an early aid

for mathematical
computations. Its only value
is that it aids the memory of
the human performing the
calculation. A skilled abacus
operator can work on
addition and subtraction
problems at the speed of a
person equipped with a hand
calculator (multiplication and
division are slower).
Abacus

 The abacus is often wrongly

attributed to China. In fact,
the oldest surviving abacus
was used in 300 B.C. by the
Babylonians. The abacus is
still in use today, principally in
the far east.
John Napier

 In 1617 an eccentric (some say

mad) Scotsman named John
Napier invented logarithms,
which are a technology that
allows multiplication to be
performed via addition.
 Ex: log2x = 5
Napier’s Bones

 The magic ingredient

is the logarithm of
each operand, which
was originally
obtained from a
printed table. But
Napier also invented
an alternative to
tables, where the
logarithm values were
carved on ivory sticks
which are now called
Napier's Bones.
Napier’s Bones
Slide Rule

 Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule,

first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the
1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury,
Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men
on the moon.
Leonardo da Vinci

 Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made

drawings of gear-driven calculating
machines but apparently never built any.
Calculating Clock

 The first gear-driven

calculating machine to
actually be built was
probably the
calculating clock, so
named by its inventor,
the German professor
Wilhelm Schickard in
1623. This device got
little publicity because
Schickard died soon
afterward in the
bubonic plague.
Blaise Pascal

 In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the

Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax
collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-
function calculator (it could only add) but couldn't
sell many because of their exorbitant cost and
because they really weren't that accurate (at that
time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the
required precision).
 Up until the present age when car dashboards
went digital, the odometer portion of a car's
speedometer used the very same mechanism as
the Pascaline to increment the next wheel after
each full revolution of the prior wheel.
8-digit Pascaline
6-digit Pascaline ( Cheaper
)
Pascaline Insides
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
 Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of calculus)
managed to build a four-function (addition,
subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator
that he called the stepped reckoner because,
instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having
ten flutes arranged around their circumference in a
stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner
employed the decimal number system (each drum
had 10 flutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate use
of the binary number system which is fundamental
to the operation of modern computers. Leibniz is
considered one of the greatest of the philosophers
but he died poor and alone.
Stepped Reckoner
Joseph Marie Jacquard

 In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph

Marie Jacquard invented a
power loom that could base its
weave (and hence the design
on the fabric) upon a pattern
automatically read from
punched wooden cards, held
together in a long row by rope.
Descendents of these
punched cards have been in
use ever since (remember the
"hanging chad" from the
Florida presidential ballots of
the year 2000?).
Jacquard’s Loom

 By selecting
particular
cards for
Jacquard's
loom you
defined the
woven
pattern
Close up of a card
Jacquard’s Loom

 Close up of a
tapestry woven by
the loom
Technology -vs- Jobs

 Jacquard's technology was

a real boon to mill owners,
but put many loom
operators out of work.
Angry mobs smashed
Jacquard looms and once
attacked Jacquard himself.
History is full of examples
of labor unrest following
technological innovation
yet most studies show
that, overall, technology
has actually increased the
number of jobs.
Charle’s Babbage

 By 1822 the English

mathematician
Charles Babbage
was proposing a
steam driven
calculating machine
the size of a room,
which he called the
Difference Engine.
Difference Engine

 This machine would be able to compute tables of

numbers, such as logarithm tables.
 He obtained government funding for this project due
to the importance of numeric tables in ocean
navigation.
 Construction of Babbage's Difference Engine proved
exceedingly difficult and the project soon became
the most expensive government funded project up
to that point in English history.
 Ten years later the device was still nowhere near
complete, acrimony abounded between all involved,
and funding dried up. The device was never
finished.
Babbage-Analytic Engine

 Babbage was not deterred, and by then

was on to his next brainstorm, which he
called the Analytic Engine.
 This device, large as a house and
powered by 6 steam engines,
 It was programmable, thanks to the
punched card technology of Jacquard.
 Babbage saw that the pattern of holes
in a punch card could be used to
represent an abstract idea such as a
problem statement or the raw data
required for that problem's solution.
Babbage-Analytic Engine
 Babbage realized that punched paper could be
employed as a storage mechanism, holding computed
numbers for future reference.
 Because of the connection to the Jacquard loom,
Babbage called the two main parts of his Analytic Engine
the "Store" and the "Mill", as both terms are used in the
weaving industry.
 The Store was where numbers were held and the Mill
was where they were "woven" into new results.
 In a modern computer these same parts are called the
memory unit and the central processing unit (CPU).
Babbage – Analytic Engine
 The Analytic Engine also had a key function
that distinguishes computers from
calculators: the conditional statement.
 A conditional statement allows a program to
achieve different results each time it is run.
 Based on the conditional statement, the
path of the program can be determined
based upon a situation that is detected at
the very moment the program is running.
Ada Byron
 Babbage befriended Ada Byron, the
daughter of the famous poet Lord
Byron
 Though she was only 19, she was
fascinated by Babbage's ideas
 She began fashioning programs for
the Analytic Engine, although still
unbuilt.
 The Analytic Engine remained unbuilt
(the British government refused to
get involved with this one) but Ada
earned her spot in history as the first
computer programmer.
 Ada invented the subroutine and was
the first to recognize the importance
of looping.
US Census

 The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S.

Constitution states that a census should be taken of all
U.S. citizens every 10 years in order to determine the
representation of the states in Congress.
 While the very first census of 1790 had only required 9
months, by 1880 the U.S. population had grown so
much that the count for the 1880 census took 7.5
years. Automation was clearly needed for the next
census.
 The census bureau offered a prize for an inventor to
help with the 1890 census and this prize was won by
Herman Hollerith,
Hollerith desk

 The Hollerith desk,

consisted of:
 a card reader which
sensed the holes in the
cards,
 a gear driven
mechanism which could
count (similar to
Pascal’s)
 A large wall of dial
indicators to display the
results of the count.
Hollerith Desk
Hollerith Desk

 Hollerith's technique
was successful and
the 1890 census was
completed in only 3
years at a savings of
5 million dollars.
IBM

 Hollerith built a company,

the Tabulating Machine
Company which, after a few
buyouts, eventually became
International Business
Machines, known today as
IBM.
Hollerith’s Inovation

 By using punch
cards, Hollerith
created a way to
store and retrieve
information.
 This was the first
type of read and
write technology
Examples of Punch Cards
US Military

 The U.S. military desired a mechanical calculator

more optimized for scientific computation.
 By World War II the U.S. had battleships that
could lob shells weighing as much as a small car
over distances up to 25 miles.
 Physicists could write the equations that
described how atmospheric drag, wind, gravity,
muzzle velocity, etc. would determine the
trajectory of the shell, but solving such equations
was extremely laborious.
US Military
 Human computers would compute results of these
equations and publish them in ballistic "firing tables"
 During World War II the U.S. military scoured the country
looking for (generally female) math majors to hire for the
job of computing these tables, but not enough humans
could be found to keep up with the need for new tables.
 Sometimes artillery pieces had to be delivered to the
battlefield without the necessary firing tables and this
meant they were close to useless because they couldn't
be aimed properly.
 Faced with this situation, the U.S. military was willing to
invest in even hair-brained schemes to automate this
type of computation.
Mark I
 One early success was the
Harvard Mark I computer
which was built as a
partnership between
Harvard and IBM in 1944.
 This was the first
programmable digital
computer made in the U.S.
 But it was not a purely
electronic computer.
Instead the Mark I was
constructed out of
switches, relays, rotating
shafts, and clutches.
Mark I
 The machine weighed 5
tons, incorporated 500
miles of wire, was 8 feet
tall and 51 feet long,
and had a 50 ft rotating
shaft running its length,
turned by a 5
horsepower electric
motor.
 The Mark I ran non-stop
for 15 years, sounding
like a roomful of ladies
knitting.
Mark I
The First Bug
 One of the primary
programmers for the Mark I
was a woman, Grace
Hopper.
 Hopper found the first
computer "bug": a dead
moth that had gotten into
the Mark I
 The word "bug" had been
used to describe a defect
since at least 1889 but
Hopper is credited with
coining the word
"debugging" to describe the
work to eliminate program
faults.
Humor

 On a humorous note, the

principal designer of the Mark I,
Howard Aiken of Harvard,
estimated in 1947 that six
electronic digital computers
would be sufficient to satisfy the
computing needs of the entire
United States.
The Future of Computers?
 IBM had commissioned this study to determine whether
it should bother developing this new invention into one
of its standard products (up until then computers were
one-of-a-kind items built by special arrangement).
 Aiken's prediction wasn't actually so bad as there were
very few institutions (principally, the government and
military) that could afford the cost of what was called a
computer in 1947.
 He just didn't foresee the micro-electronics revolution
which would allow something like an IBM Stretch
computer of 1959:
First Generation
Computers
 The first electronic computer was
designed at Iowa State between
1939-1942
 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer used
the binary system(1’s and 0’s).
 Contained vacuum tubes and stored
numbers for calculations by burning
holes in paper
IBM Stretch - 1959
IBM Stretch - 1959
Atanasoff – Berry Computer

 One of the earliest attempts to

build an all-electronic (that is,
no gears, cams, belts, shafts,
etc.) digital computer occurred
in 1937 by J. V. Atanasoff,
 This machine was the first to
store data as a charge on a
capacitor, which is how today's
computers store information in
their main memory (DRAM or
dynamic RAM). As far as its
inventors were aware, it was
also the first to employ binary
arithmetic.
Colussus
 The Colossus, built during
World War II by Britain for
the purpose of breaking the
cryptographic codes used by
Germany.
 Britain led the world in
designing and building
electronic machines
dedicated to code breaking,
and was routinely able to
read coded Germany radio
transmissions.
 Not a general purpose,
reprogrammable machine.
Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Calculator.
 The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital
computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.
 ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania
between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John
Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who
got funding from the war department after promising
they could build a machine that would replace all the
"computers”
 ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and
used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes.
ENIAC
ENIAC
Programming the ENIAC
 To reprogram the ENIAC you had to rearrange
the patch cords that you can observe on the left
in the prior photo, and the settings of 3000
switches that you can observe on the right.
 To program a modern computer, you type out a
program with statements like:
 Circumference = 3.14 * diameter
 To perform this computation on ENIAC you had
to rearrange a large number of patch cords and
then locate three particular knobs on that vast
wall of knobs and set them to 3, 1, and 4.
Programming the ENIAC
Problems with the ENIAC

 The ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes to hold a charge

 Vacuum tubes were so notoriously unreliable that even
twenty years later many neighborhood drug stores
provided a "tube tester"
Replacing a vacuum tube
The Stored Program Computer

 In 1945 John von Neumann presented his idea

of a computer that would store computer
instructions in a CPU
 The CPU(Central Processing Unit) consisted of
elements that would control the computer
electronically
The Stored Program
Computer
 The EDVAC, EDSAC and UNIVAC were
the first computers to use the stored
program concept
 Theyused vacuum tubes so they were
too expensive and too large for
households to own and afford
Electronic Discrete Variable
Automatic Computer
 It took days to change
ENIAC's program.
 Eckert and Mauchly's next
teamed up with the
mathematician John von
Neumann to design
EDVAC, which pioneered
the stored program.
 After ENIAC and EDVAC
came other computers with
humorous names such as
ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, and,
of course, MANIAC
Second Generation Computers

 In 1947, the
transistor was
invented
 The transistor made
computers smaller,
less expensive and
increased
calculating speeds.
Second Generation Computers
 Second generation
computers also saw
a new way data was
stored
 Punch cards were
replaced with
magnetic tapes and
reel to reel machines
Universal Automatic Computer

 The UNIVAC computer

was the first commercial
(mass produced)
computer.
 In the 50's, UNIVAC (a
contraction of "Universal
Automatic Computer")
was the household word
for "computer" just as
"Kleenex" is for "tissue".
 UNIVAC was also the
first computer to employ
magnetic tape.
 Third Generation Computers

 Transistors were
replaced by integrated
circuits(IC)
 One IC could replace
hundreds of transistors
 This made computers
even smaller and
faster.
Fourth Generation Computers

 In 1970 the Intel

Corporation invented the
Microprocessor: an entire
CPU on one chip
 This led to
microcomputers-
computers on a desk
 Computer Programming
in the ’70’s
 If you learned
computer
programming in the
1970's, you dealt
with what today are
called mainframe
computers, such as
the IBM 7090 (shown
below), IBM 360, or
IBM 370.
Time-Sharing

 There were 2 ways to

interact with a
mainframe.
 The first was called time
sharing because the
computer gave each
user a tiny sliver of time
in a round-robin fashion.
 Perhaps 100 users would
be simultaneously
logged on, each typing
on a teletype such as
the following:
Teletype
 A teletype was a
motorized typewriter that
could transmit your
keystrokes to the
mainframe and then print
the computer's response
on its roll of paper.
 You typed a single line of
text, hit the carriage
return button, and waited
for the teletype to begin
noisily printing the
computer's response
Batch-Mode Processing
 The alternative to time
sharing was batch
mode processing,
where the computer
gives its full attention to
your program.
 In exchange for getting
the computer's full
attention at run-time,
you had to agree to
prepare your program
off-line on a key punch
machine which
generated punch cards.
Punch Cards
 University students in the 1970's bought blank
cards a linear foot at a time from the university
bookstore.
 Each card could hold only 1 program statement.
 To submit your program to the mainframe, you
placed your stack of cards in the hopper of a
card reader.
 Your program would be run whenever the
computer made it that far.
 You often submitted your deck and then went to
dinner or to bed and came back later hoping to
see a successful printout showing your results
 Programming Today

 But things changed

fast. By the 1990's a
university student
would typically own
his own computer
and have exclusive
use of it in his dorm
room.
Microprocessor

 This transformation was a

result of the invention of the
microprocessor.
 A microprocessor (uP) is a
computer that is fabricated
on an integrated circuit (IC).
 Computers had been around
for 20 years before the first
microprocessor was
developed at Intel in 1971.
Microprocessor
 The micro in the
name
microprocessor
refers to the physical
size.
 Intel didn't invent
the electronic
computer, but they
were the first to
succeed in
cramming an entire
computer on a single
Integrated Circuits
 The microelectronics
revolution is what
allowed the amount of
hand-crafted wiring
seen in the prior photo
to be mass-produced
as an integrated
circuit which is a
small sliver of silicon
the size of your
thumbnail
Integrated Circuits

 Integrated circuits
and microprocessors
allowed computers
to be faster
 This led to a new
age of computers
 The first home-brew
computers is called
the ALTAIR 8800
Apple 1 Computer - 1976
The IBM PC
Commodore 64
Apple Macintosh
The Amiga
Windows 3
Macintosh System 7
Apple Newton
Standard UNIX
PowerPC
IBM OS/2
Windows 95