History of Computing 1
A mobile phone can scan and solve a Sudoku puzzle in seconds. I can play music, at no cost, over the internet. I don’t know where in the world the music is coming from. This PC can play HD videos. It has to process 1920 pixels (dots) on each of 1080 lines. Each pixel can be any one of about 250,000 colours. And it has to do this at least 25 times per second. That is up to12,000,000,000,000 possible combinations a second. The disc drive on this laptop can store more than 700,000 books, or 250 HD videos. This disc is relatively small by current standards. I can have “phone” or video conversations with anyone in the world, at no cost, over the internet (once I have paid for a broadband connection) I can email anyone in the world, at no cost (once I have broadband and the computer). I can store documents and photos on the internet, somewhere, at no cost. I can search for and find a huge amount of free information. And free software, Soon, mobile phones will be used instead of cash and cheques to make payments. This PC cost half the amount in £s of a new Commodore PET in the 1970s. The performance of this PC is around 10,000,000 times greater. Moore’s Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law 2
Digital computing – 1s and 0s – binary! A sequence of arithmetic or logical operations which can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem A series of instructions that act upon data not known in full until the programme is run. Turing machine Van Neuman machine 3
Numbers – binary notation (17 th /18 th centuries) Calculators and early computers – algorithm (800 AD); - Napier develops logarithms (17 th century) - Pascal’s mechanical adding machine (1642) - Jacquard loom controlled by punched card (1801) - The first mass produced mechanical calculator (1820s) - Babbage (and Ada Lovelace) - The Analytical engine had many properties of a modern computer, including memory and storage (1820s- 1840s) - His machines could be reprogrammed to solve new problems - Ada Lovelace assisted in creating a recursive (looping) calculation (see definition of Computing) (1843) 100 years ahead of his time.... 4
Data encoding on punched cards (1890) Telegraphy - early experimental wired transmission over a few metres(1810) - first regularly used electrical telegraph (a few kilometres) ( 1833) - Samuel Morse initial patent (1837) - first commercial telegraph, Paddington to West Drayton (1839) - first transmission of basic images (like a fax) (1843) - basic images transmitted between Paris and Lyon (1855) - Morse telegraph system deployed coast to coast in the USA (1861) - First successful transatlantic cable (1866) - Telegraph lines from Britain to India (1870) - First wireless transmission of Morse code (25 metres) (1895) - Marconi transmitted over 6 kilometres (1896) - Marconi transmits the letter S by Morse code across the Atlantic (1901) Telephony - Bell’s first patent – 1876 5
Thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) - early experiments 1870 - usable “valves” – early 1900s - amplifiers - around 1905 ..... Which enabled........ Long distance telephone transmission - first coast to coast call across the USA (1915) Radio - first commercial broadcasts 1920s Display technology - The Cathode Ray tube invented in 1887 - First display of geometric shapes 1907 - Commercial products 1922 - Baird’s first TV demonstration (1925) - First regular television service (1936) 6
1931/2 – valve-based binary calculator developed at Manchester University 1935 – IBM punched card and relay calculator which can complete a multiplication in 1 second. 1937 – Turing Machine defined 1938 – Polish team develop the “bombe” to be used in breaking the Enigma code 1938 – Zuse develops a programmable binary calculator, which uses punched tape and relays 1939 – 25 bit binary addition using vacuum tubes 1939 – relay-based calculator developed at Bell Labs 1939 - War beaks out, and the pace of development accelerates, primarily for encryption and code breaking 7
In its simplest form, a Turing machine is composed of a "tape", a ribbon of paper of indefinite length. There is a "head" that can read the symbol, choose to write a new symbol in it’s place, and then move left or right. The new symbol can define the next operation The output of one operation modifies the next – it is “programmable” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine 8
'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers' Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943 Ooops. About 3 billion – 3,000,000,000 - PCs have been manufactured to date, and 1.2 billion mobile phones were produced in 2010 alone. 9
1940 - Turing and others refine the “bombes” 1941 – capacitive drum storage first used 1941 – Zuse builds the first operational programmable calculator capable of floating-point calculations. It used 3000 relays and is the size of a room. 1943 – similar electromechanical machine developed at Harvard. It is 51 feet long, weighs 5 tons and has 750,000 parts 1943 – the Bletchley team (Tommy Flowers in charge) build Colossus. It uses 2400 vacuum tubes and can carry out 5000 calculations a second 1943 – development of ENIAC (to calculate shell trajectories) begins in the USA 1945 – Von Neumann’s initial paper on the concept of stored-programme computers 10
A model for a computing machine that uses a single storage structure to hold both the set of instructions on how to perform the computation and the data required or generated by the computation. John von Neumann helped to create the model as an example of a general-purpose computing machine. By treating the instructions in the same way as the data, the machine could easily change the instructions. In other words the machine was reprogrammable. He had read and admired Turing’s work! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture 11
November 1945 – ENIAC completed, too late for the war. But it worked. It used 17,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tons and consumed 150kw of electrical power. It can complete a multiplication in 3ms. 1947 – Harvard Mark2, a huge mechanical calculator using 13,000 relays 1947 – a moth flies into the Harvard Mk2. A technician notes “the first actual case of a bug being found” 1947 – CRT-based memory developed at Manchester University 1947 – patent application for magnetic core memory 1947 – semiconductor effect noted at Bell Labs 1948 – the world’s first true stored programme computer prototype at Manchester University 1949 – IBM punched card and vacuum tube programmable calculator 1949 – EDSAC computer produced at Cambridge University with funding from J. Lyons. This is the first full-scale stored-programme computer 1949 – the first patent application for a simple Integrated Circuit (this was theoretical) 12
'While a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 10000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.' Popular mechanics, 1949 This laptop is fairly heavy. It weighs about 2kg. It has more than 100,000,000,000 transistors in its various integrated circuits. 13
1950 - ACE (based on Turing designs) produced at the NPL Teddington 1950 – first use of Germanium diodes in a computer developed for the USA Bureau of Standards 1951 – LEO, the first commercial computer (based on EDSAC), is operation at J. Lyons. It is used for payroll, stock and production inventories. 1952 – Geoffrey Dummer, at the Royal Radar Establishment, produces a paper on, and attempts to build, integrated circuits 1954 – the first commercial transistor produced by Texas instruments 1958 – working prototype integrated circuit at Texas Instruments. The inventor, Jack Kilby, later won the Nobel Prize for Physics for this invention 14
'I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year' Editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957 15
1970s – a few thousand transistors on a chip 1974 – 10,000 transistors 1980 – 100,000 transistors 2005 – 1 billion (1,000,000,000) transistors 2012 – tens of billions................ 16
'But what... is it good for?' Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968 17
A technical demonstration in1968 gave a preview of what would become the staples of computing life in the 21st century - e-mail, hypertext, word processing, video conferencing, and the mouse. The demonstration required technical support staff and a mainframe time-sharing computer that were far too costly for individual business use at the time. 18
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