In the last few decades, the idea of a computer and what it does for people. has changed tremendously. The development of computers has made

Transcription

1 4A ) Introduction In the last few decades, the idea of a computer and what it does for people has changed tremendously. The development of computers has made possible a huge wave of improvement and progress in making the world more accessible to the general public. In the 1970s, few people could even fathom the extent to which computers would be used today. During this time, several companies were beginning to set foot in the computing industry in an effort to increase income potential by making personal computers more appealing to use and accessible for everyone. This essay will analyze the four key points of the history of computing during the 1970s. 1) Important people Robert Noyce Robert Noyce was one of the pioneers in semiconductor technology which has made possible unprecedented computing power for the decades to come. Noyce grew up in Grinnell, Iowa. He exhibited fantastic talent for mathematics and science. In graduate school, Noyce became so known for

2 his keen mind that his colleagues called him Rapid Robert. Noyce received a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT in After Noyce left his position as researcher in Shockley Semiconductor Labs, he co-founded the very important and influential Fairchild Semiconductor Corp, a company that still manufactures semiconductor chips and other technology that is used to build and run literally every electronic device in use today. Most importantly, during the early 1970s, Noyce founded NM Electronics, which soon became the semiconductor chipset-manufacturing giant Intel Corp. During the 1970s, Intel dawned the Era of integrated electronics. Under the leadership of Noyce and Moore (his co-founder), Intel developed the Intel 4004, the first general purpose programmable processor on the market. This was used as a building block with software to perform a variety of functions in all kinds of electronic devices to come. Dennis Ritchie On the other side of the computing industry, Dennis Ritchie would reach an important milestone in software development during the 1970s. Not only did Dennis Ritchie create the C programming language, but he was also one of the most important contributors to the development of the UNIX operating system. The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. Unix has also been extremely important because it established concepts and principles that are now core

3 precepts of computing. In addition to his contributions to software development during the 1970s, Ritchie also played an important role in cybersecurity where he worked with cryptographers James Reeds and Robert Morris on building a cypher machine for the NSA. 2) Hardware development Intel 4004 World s First Microprocessor In 1971, Intel responded to a request for 12 custom chips from a company that wanted to create a new high-end calculator. Intel instead took an incredibly overkill route: it proposed to build one general purpose chip instead, with unprecedented processing power at that time, and in doing so, they created the world s first general purpose microprocessor. The Intel 4004 had a clock speed of 740 khz and contained 2300 transistors. Its scalar performance was about 60,000 instructions per second, allowing it to compete with the 1946 ENIAC. Instead of taking up a huge room, the Intel 4004 was the size of a fingernail. The Floppy Disk The first floppy disk was introduced in 1971, invented by IBM. The basic technology of a floppy disk consisted of a plastic disc coated with iron oxide and enclosed in a plastic protective container. The floppy disk went on to become the dominant data storage and exchange technology for nearly 3 decades from the time of its release. One reason for the floppy disks quick acceptance was its low cost. Their sizes also quickly shrank from the

4 original 8-inch disk to the smaller, industry standard 5.25 inch diskettes. Then, in the mid-1980s, 3.5-inch floppy disks with hard plastic protective covers (the floppy disks that we are familiar with today) were crowned as the new industry standard which remained in place for another decade. 3) Software development CP/M Developed by Gary Kildall in 1973, CP/M stood for Control Program for Microcomputers. CP/M was the first operating system to run on computers across multiple vendor platforms. CP/M quickly became the preferred operating system for the Altair systems that were based on the Intel 8080 processor. During the mid-1970s, it was expected that CP/M would go on to dominate the microcomputer OS world. However, two obstacles arose. First, there was the release of user-centered personal computers such as the Apple II, which chose to use a BASIC interpreter for their OS instead of CP/M. Second, due to negligence and miscalculation of the importance in part of Gary Kildall, IBM s 16-bit Intel 8086 based PC opted to contract out to the young Microsoft company to provide the OS for the new IBM PC. Microsoft then purchased QDOS (created by Tim Paterson and emulated the API of CP/M) and used QDOS as the basis for their well-known MS-DOS which started Microsoft s operating system enterprise. Many regard this CP/M incident as an injustice to Gary Kildall, as he had to endure being

5 compared to Bill gates for the rest of his life, since Microsoft s PC-DOS and MS-DOS clean-room reverse engineered CP/M. C Programming Language C is by far the most important and most commonly used programming language even today. Most of this has to do with the fact that it is heavily optimized, and has extensive cross-platform support. C evolved from its predecessor B (1973), which was the successor of BCPL (1967). C was born in 1971 as a system-level programming language of certain parts of UNIX. It was first implemented by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell. C was developed to bypass / work around certain restrictions that BCPL and B had, and it was implemented so well that it became a core industry programming language. 4) Impact on society All these developments during the 1970s served to ready middle-class society for the rise of the computer age. Previous to this decade, computers were extremely bulky, energy inefficient, and very costly. Pairing together development in semiconductor technology which allowed processors to shrink in size from a whole room to the size of a fingernail, and also progress in software development like new programming languages and paradigms, the computing industry got a huge jumpstart into mainstream consumer life. The release of the Altair systems, Apple II, IBM s Intel 8086 PC, all served to normalize the idea of a computer in the minds of society. Middle class families could actually now afford to own a computer for

6 recreational purposes such as 8-bit games, or even business purposes served by computation. This effectively laid the groundwork for the booming computer era that followed in the following decades.