Hi, today we'll learn about some very important topics of Computer including History (its a long article because i have written full history of computer you should have to know why computer was created).
Milestone In Computer Architecture
Hundreds of different kinds of computers have been designed and built during the evolution of the modern digital computer, Most have been long forgotten but a few have had a significant impact on modern ideas, Needless to say this article only touches on the highlights and leaves many stones unturned, Slater (1987) is a good place to look for additional historical material on the people who founded the computer age, For short biographies and beautiful color photographs by Louis Fabian Bachrach of some of the key people who founded the computer age see Morgan’s coffee-table book (1997).
"The First Generation Vacuum Tubes"
(1945–1955)
The stimulus for the electronic computer
was World War II. During the early part of the war, German submarines were wreaking havoc on British ships. Commands were sent from the German admirals in Berlin to the submarines by radio, which the British could, and did, intercept. The problem was that these messages were encoded using a device called the ENIGMA, whose forerunner was designed by amateur inventor and former U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson.
Early in the war, British intelligence managed to acquire an ENIGMA machine from Polish Intelligence, which had stolen it from the Germans. However, to break a coded message, a huge amount of computation was needed, and it was needed very soon after the message was intercepted to be of any use. To decode these messages, the British government set up a top secret laboratory that built an electronic computer called the COLOSSUS. The famous British mathematician Alan Turing helped design this machine.
The COLOSSUS was operational in 1943, but since the British government kept virtually every aspect of the project classified as a military secret for 30 years, the COLOSSUS line was basically a dead end. It is only worth noting because it was the world’s first electronic digital computer. In addition to destroying Zuse’s machines and stimulating the construction of the COLOSSUS, the war also affected computing in the United States. The army needed range tables for aiming its heavy artillery. It produced these tables by hiring hundreds of women to crank them out using hand calculators (women were thought to be more accurate than men). Nevertheless, the process was time consuming and errors often crept in.
John Mauchley, who knew of Atanasoff’s work as well as Stibbitz’, was aware that the army was interested in mechanical calculators. Like many computer scientists after him, he put together a grant proposal asking the army for funding to build an electronic computer. The proposal was accepted in 1943, and Mauchley and his graduate student, J. Presper Eckert, proceeded to build an electronic computer, which they called the:
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). It consisted of 18,000 vacuum tubes and 1500 relays. The ENIAC weighed 30 tons and consumed 140 kilowatts of power.
Architecturally, the machine had 20 registers, each capable of holding a 10-digit decimal number. (A decimal register is very small memory that can hold one number up to some maximum number of decimal digits, somewhat like the odometer that keeps track of how far a car has traveled in its lifetime.)
The ENIAC was programmed by setting up 6000 multi position switches and connecting a multitude of sockets with a veritable forest of jumper cables. The machine was not finished until 1946, when it was too late to be of any use for its original purpose. While Eckert and Mauchley were working on the EDVAC, one of the people involved in the ENIAC project, John von Neumann, went to Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies to build his own version of the EDVAC, the IAS machine. He came to realize that the program could be represented in digital form in the computer’s memory, along with the data. He also saw that the clumsy serial decimal arithmetic used by the ENIAC, with each digit represented by 10 vacuum tubes (1 on and 9 off) could be replaced by using parallel binary arithmetic, something Atanasoff had realized years earlier.
Von Neumann was a genius in the same league as Leonardo Da Vinci. He spoke many languages, was an expert in the physical sciences and mathematics, and had total recall of everything he ever heard, saw, or read. He was able to quote from memory the verbatim text of books he had read years earlier. At the time he became interested in computers, he was already the most eminent mathematician in the world. One of the things that was soon apparent to him was that programming computers with huge numbers of switches and cables was
slow, tedious, and inflexible.
The basic design, which he first described, is now known as a von Neumann machine. It was used in the EDSAC, the first stored program computer, and is still the basis for nearly all digital computers, even now, more than half a century later. The von Neumann machine had five basic parts:
the memory, the arithmetic logic unit, the control unit, and the input and output equipment. The memory consisted of 4096 words, a word holding 40 bits, each a 0 or a 1. Each word held either two 20-bit instructions or a 40-bit signed integer. The instructions had 8 bits devoted to telling the instruction type, and 12 bits for specifying one of the 4096 memory words. Together, the arithmetic logic unit and the control unit formed the ‘‘brain’’ of the computer. In modern computers they are combined onto a single chip called the CPU (Central Processing Unit).
Inside the arithmetic logic unit was a special internal 40-bit register called the accumulator. A typical instruction added a word of memory to the accumulator or stored the contents of the accumulator in memory. The machine did not have floating-point arithmetic because von Neumann felt that any competent mathematician ought to be able to keep track of the decimal point (actually the binary point) in his or her head.
At about the same time von Neumann was building the IAS machine, researchers at M.I.T. were also building a computer. Unlike IAS, ENIAC and other machines of its type, which had long word lengths and which were intended for heavy number crunching, the M.I.T. machine, the Whirlwind I, had a 16-bit word and was designed for real-time control. This project led to the invention of the magnetic core memory by Jay Forrester, and then eventually to the first commercial minicomputer. While all this was going on, IBM was a small company engaged in the business of producing card punches and mechanical card sorting machines.
Milestone In Computer Architecture
Hundreds of different kinds of computers have been designed and built during the evolution of the modern digital computer, Most have been long forgotten but a few have had a significant impact on modern ideas, Needless to say this article only touches on the highlights and leaves many stones unturned, Slater (1987) is a good place to look for additional historical material on the people who founded the computer age, For short biographies and beautiful color photographs by Louis Fabian Bachrach of some of the key people who founded the computer age see Morgan’s coffee-table book (1997).
"The First Generation Vacuum Tubes"
(1945–1955)
The stimulus for the electronic computer
was World War II. During the early part of the war, German submarines were wreaking havoc on British ships. Commands were sent from the German admirals in Berlin to the submarines by radio, which the British could, and did, intercept. The problem was that these messages were encoded using a device called the ENIGMA, whose forerunner was designed by amateur inventor and former U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson.
Early in the war, British intelligence managed to acquire an ENIGMA machine from Polish Intelligence, which had stolen it from the Germans. However, to break a coded message, a huge amount of computation was needed, and it was needed very soon after the message was intercepted to be of any use. To decode these messages, the British government set up a top secret laboratory that built an electronic computer called the COLOSSUS. The famous British mathematician Alan Turing helped design this machine.
The COLOSSUS was operational in 1943, but since the British government kept virtually every aspect of the project classified as a military secret for 30 years, the COLOSSUS line was basically a dead end. It is only worth noting because it was the world’s first electronic digital computer. In addition to destroying Zuse’s machines and stimulating the construction of the COLOSSUS, the war also affected computing in the United States. The army needed range tables for aiming its heavy artillery. It produced these tables by hiring hundreds of women to crank them out using hand calculators (women were thought to be more accurate than men). Nevertheless, the process was time consuming and errors often crept in.
John Mauchley, who knew of Atanasoff’s work as well as Stibbitz’, was aware that the army was interested in mechanical calculators. Like many computer scientists after him, he put together a grant proposal asking the army for funding to build an electronic computer. The proposal was accepted in 1943, and Mauchley and his graduate student, J. Presper Eckert, proceeded to build an electronic computer, which they called the:
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). It consisted of 18,000 vacuum tubes and 1500 relays. The ENIAC weighed 30 tons and consumed 140 kilowatts of power.
Architecturally, the machine had 20 registers, each capable of holding a 10-digit decimal number. (A decimal register is very small memory that can hold one number up to some maximum number of decimal digits, somewhat like the odometer that keeps track of how far a car has traveled in its lifetime.)
The ENIAC was programmed by setting up 6000 multi position switches and connecting a multitude of sockets with a veritable forest of jumper cables. The machine was not finished until 1946, when it was too late to be of any use for its original purpose. While Eckert and Mauchley were working on the EDVAC, one of the people involved in the ENIAC project, John von Neumann, went to Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies to build his own version of the EDVAC, the IAS machine. He came to realize that the program could be represented in digital form in the computer’s memory, along with the data. He also saw that the clumsy serial decimal arithmetic used by the ENIAC, with each digit represented by 10 vacuum tubes (1 on and 9 off) could be replaced by using parallel binary arithmetic, something Atanasoff had realized years earlier.
Von Neumann was a genius in the same league as Leonardo Da Vinci. He spoke many languages, was an expert in the physical sciences and mathematics, and had total recall of everything he ever heard, saw, or read. He was able to quote from memory the verbatim text of books he had read years earlier. At the time he became interested in computers, he was already the most eminent mathematician in the world. One of the things that was soon apparent to him was that programming computers with huge numbers of switches and cables was
slow, tedious, and inflexible.
The basic design, which he first described, is now known as a von Neumann machine. It was used in the EDSAC, the first stored program computer, and is still the basis for nearly all digital computers, even now, more than half a century later. The von Neumann machine had five basic parts:
the memory, the arithmetic logic unit, the control unit, and the input and output equipment. The memory consisted of 4096 words, a word holding 40 bits, each a 0 or a 1. Each word held either two 20-bit instructions or a 40-bit signed integer. The instructions had 8 bits devoted to telling the instruction type, and 12 bits for specifying one of the 4096 memory words. Together, the arithmetic logic unit and the control unit formed the ‘‘brain’’ of the computer. In modern computers they are combined onto a single chip called the CPU (Central Processing Unit).
Inside the arithmetic logic unit was a special internal 40-bit register called the accumulator. A typical instruction added a word of memory to the accumulator or stored the contents of the accumulator in memory. The machine did not have floating-point arithmetic because von Neumann felt that any competent mathematician ought to be able to keep track of the decimal point (actually the binary point) in his or her head.
At about the same time von Neumann was building the IAS machine, researchers at M.I.T. were also building a computer. Unlike IAS, ENIAC and other machines of its type, which had long word lengths and which were intended for heavy number crunching, the M.I.T. machine, the Whirlwind I, had a 16-bit word and was designed for real-time control. This project led to the invention of the magnetic core memory by Jay Forrester, and then eventually to the first commercial minicomputer. While all this was going on, IBM was a small company engaged in the business of producing card punches and mechanical card sorting machines.
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