The History of Computers. How did this all get started?

The History of Computers How did this all get started?

Learning Goals By the end of this unit, you should be able to... Recognize and state the trends that led to current day computers Be able to list examples of early computers and their contributions Be able to list some of the major players (e.g. who was Charles Babbage?) To gain a sense of the rapid development and huge distances that have been traveled, particularly in the last 30 years

The Abacus The oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 BC by the Babylonians. The word calculus comes from the Latin word for pebble There are typically 4 or 5 markers for each finger, and 1 or 2 markers for each hand 300 BC

A More Modern Abacus

Slide Rules Our parents / grandparents used slide rules... First build in England in 1632 Used up until the 60s NASA used these for their calculations for Apollo

The Calculating Clock First gear-driven calculating machine actually built Invented by Wilhelm Schickard Sadly, Schickard died of the plague not long after... 1623

The Pascaline Blaise Pascal (19) invented this tool to help his father, a tax collector 50 were built, though suffered from inaccurate gears Up until the digital age, cars used the same mechanism in the odometer to increment a subsequent wheel after a full revolution of the first 1642

Stepped Reckoner Gears were unfortunately inaccurate In response, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz invented the stepped reckoner It used a fluted cylinder with teeth of varying lengths Depending on the position, a sliding gear would meet with some or all of these teeth to get different results 1673

The Jacquard Loom Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard Powered loom that used punched wooden cards to automatically read in a pattern Needles pushed the threads through the holes to achieve different designs 1801

Making cards 1801

Jacquard s own pattern To demonstrate the coolness factor, Jacquard wove this self portrait It required 10,000 punch cards! 1801

Not a popular guy... The loom was able to replace workers due to its efficiency Consequently there was much unrest and many looms were smashed, and Jacquard even attacked Interestingly... history has shown that technology, in the long run, always seems to increase the number of jobs available... 1801

Charles Babbage An English mathematician, he proposed a steam-driven calculating machine (the size of a room) He called this little device the Difference Engine The government funded him for their use in ocean navigation tables At that time, the British gov t published a 7 vol. set of nag. tables which came with a companion volume of over 1000 corrections 1820s

Charles Babbage The device was never completed But it did gain the dubious honour of the most expensive governmentfunded project in English history (up to that point) 1820s

Analytic(al) Engine Instead, he went on to envision the Analytic Engine Large as a house, with 6 steam engines required... This device broke ground for its plan to use punchcard technology... i.e. it could be programmed! What s more, it could hold data.. it had a rudimentary memory via the punch cards The Store held the numbers; the Mill wove them into new results 1820s

Analytic(al) Engine Instead, he went on to envision the Analytic Engine Large as a house, with 6 steam engines required... This device broke ground for its plan to use punchcard technology... i.e. it could be programmed! Memory! CPU! What s more, it could hold data.. it had a rudimentary memory via the punch cards The Store held the numbers; the Mill wove them into new results 1820s

Analytic(al) Engine It also had a fancy new feature: the conditional statement! 1820s

Charles Babbage & Ada Byron During this time, Babbage became friends with 19- year-old Ada Byron She later married (someone else) and because Countess Lady Lovelace He wrote letters describing his work and met with her She wrote back and described her Notes Detailed sequences of instructions she had prepared for the Analytic Engine 1820s

Charles Babbage & Ada Byron It was through these interactions that Byron because the first computer programmer in history She invented the subrountine (function), and recognized the importance of loops The programming language Ada was named in recognition of her work 1820s

(Oh, and the Analytic Engine.. it wasn t built either... but Babbage did dabble in things here and there... such as inventing the modern postal service, and the opthalmoscope)

Census Taking In 1790 the first census took 9 months The 1880 census took almost 8 years A prize offered to the inventor of a better census system went to Herman Hollerith for the 1890 census He adopted (finally) the loom punch cards for computation 1890s

Hollerith Desk Hollerith s invention was a desk with... A card reader could sense holes in the card, which indicated numbers Gears that turned to add this count to the total A wall of dials to display the total 1890s

Hollerith Desk The 1890 census? Took 3 years to complete Saved over 5 million dollars 1890s

Hollerith The original punch cards could not be changed Hollerith observed that it would be useful to read one set of cards, and then have a device punch new cards in response This allowed for more complicated analyses This was the same idea that Babbage had... 1890s - 1900s

The Tabulating Machine Company Hollerith started a company called the Tabulating Machine Company It leased tabulating machines (punch card machines) to companies Early adopters include department store sales analysis Pennsylvania Steel Co. for cost accounting based on labour and manufacturing And of course the census (though there was later competition from the Powers company) 1901

1920

The Tabulating Machine Company After a name change to Computing Tabulating Recording Co... The company, in 1924, changed it s name to International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)...you may have heard of it! 1924

Punch Cards...became the staple Gas bill... punched card you had to return Government issued cheques Tolls on highways Library books Employee time cards 1900s - 1980s

Mark I The original IBM inventions didn t require negative numbers of multiplication since there uses were limited to accounting and inventory But the US military wished a system that was more scientific... They wanted to calculate shell trajectories based on physicists formulas -- called firing tables Hired people to do this job (the origin of the term computer!) An early success in automation was the Mark I 1944

Mark I Built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944 The first programmable digital computer ever! It contained switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches...oh, and it filled a large room It used 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51 feet long! 1944

Mark I 1944

One of Mark s tape readers: 1944

Mark I It operated on numbers 23-digits wide Could add/subtract in 3/10ths of a second Could multiply in 4 seconds Could divide in 10 seconds computers require less than a billionth of a second to add It could store 72 numbers s computers can store nearly a billion numbers in RAM, and 10s of billions on the hard drive 1944

Mark I The principle designer, Howard Aiken (Harvard), is perhaps best known for his estimate that six electronic digital computers would be enough to satisfy the computing needs of the entire US IBM asked him to figure this out to determine if it was worth developing this invention as a standard product Luckily IBM didn t give up... But no one foresaw the micro-electronics revolution 1947

Grace Hopper Remember the computer bug? It was the Mark I that Grace Hopper debugged! She went on to develop the first high-level language (i.e. not 1 s and 0 s!) called Flow-matic It eventually became COBOL A high-level language requires an intermediary program to translate it back to binary... this is called a compiler Hopper thus wrote the first compiler, too 1953

Alan Turing s Bombe The second world war also saw another use for computers: codebreaking Alan Turing developed an electromechanical machine for breaking Enigma codes 1930s

Colossus This later led to the Colossus......both Colossus Mark I and Colossus Mark II Unlike the Harvard Mark machines, this relied on vacuum tubes 1943

ENIAC: General Purpose Computing Although still funded by military money, this time the goal was an all-purpose machine that could replace all the computers ENIAC filled a 20 x 40 foot room, weight 30 tonnes, and used nearly 20,000 vacuum tubes Like Mark I it used paper card readers ENIAC was silent, but HOT! About 174,000 watts of heat, in fact To program, patch cords were rearranged 1945

ENIAC ENIAC could only hold 20 numbers at a time But without moving parts it was much faster than the Mark I Multiplication took 2.8 thousandths of a second It s clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second (ours today are about 2.5 billion per second) The first sample problem solved took 20 seconds (compared to the human answer obtained after 40 hours of work with a mechanical calculator) 1945

ENIAC ENIAC s first task? To determine if the hydrogen bomb was possible Sadly, 500,000 punch cards later, it s answer was yes 1945

ENIAC 1945

UNIVAC By the end of the 50s, computers were no longer one-of-a-kind hand-built devices only for government and universities The inventors of ENIAC, Eckert and Mauchly went on to start a company called UNIVAC ( UNIVersal Automatic Computer ) This became the household word for computer in the 50s This was the first computer to use magnetic tape

Micro-electronics Revolution Computers remained enormous for a long stretch of time... The micro electronics rev. saw the hand-wiring of the past mass-produced as integrated circuits These are fast to produce... and small 1959

IBM 7030 (Stretch) 1959

PDP-12 the mini- computer! An entire industry segment was devoted to mini computers The PDP-12 was a dual processor, 12-bit minicomputer intended for interactive lab use (721 were built) 1969

Mainframe computers Large-scale, general purpose computers Two ways to interact: Time sharing (everyone got a short turn: realtime interaction) Batch mode (have your program ready before hand: non-realtime interaction) E.g. IBM 7090, IBM 360, IBM 370 1970s

Mainframe computers (IBM 7090) 1970s

Teletype Simultaneous, time-share interaction was achieved with a teletype 1970s

Key Punch Machine To write your program to be run in batch mode, you needed a key punch machine to prepare your punch cards 1970s

CDC 7600 (Early Cray Supercomp.) 1970s

Microcomputing True micro computing did not become possible until the invention of the microprocessor Industry giant, Intel, invented the microprocessor in 1971 (20 years after the first computer) These general purpose chips could be used for anything Instead users supplied a program, stored in memory, to generate the desired behaviour

Altair 8800 (8080 microprocessor) The first personal computer (PC) Developed by MITS Hand to built from a mail-order kit! 1975

Altair 8800 (8080 microprocessor) In it s original form, you could only make the lights blink It was programmed by flipping switches, then a special switch that loaded it all into memory-- this was repeated until the entire program was loaded, at which point it was run It later included a tape reader, additional RAM cards and a teletype terminal 1975

Back to BASICs Around this time the Altair designers received a letter asking if they were interested, and to contact a Seattle-based company, called Micro-soft They contacted them only to realize there was no BASIC (yet), or company for that matter They were intrigued, though... Micro-soft (then Bill Gates and Paul Allen) wrote their own 8080 simulator (since they couldn t afford an Altair) and ran it on a PDP-10 1975

Back to BASICs Altair BASIC was then delivered to the company by Allen It was written on paper tape (with a bug) The next day the bug was corrected and the very first program typed in was 2+2...luckily, it returned 4 Micro-soft was born! The language proved incredibly popular.. today there are more dialects of BASIC than any other language 1975

Enter Apple... About this time Apple started on the scene, inspired by the Altair Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built their own computer and released it April 1st, 1976 The original Apple was the first single circuit board computer It had a video interface, 8k of RAM and a keyboard 1976

Enter Apple... About 200 units were built over 10 months and sold for $666.66! 1976

Now things start taking off... In 1977 we see the Apple II (sometimes written Apple ][) This was the first massproduced Apple machine 1977

Now things start taking off... By 1981 we have the IBM PC Home Computer As well as MS-DOS 1977

Apple Macintosh Never trust a computer you cannot lift! One of the most famous TV commercials ever made... 1984

Microsoft Windows Although far from the originators of the idea (Xerox gets that distinction for its STAR interface), undeniably the introduction of Windows changed the face of computers forever Released to the public in 1985, it was the first mass produced HCI that used the Desktop metaphor extensively, as well as the mouse The Desktop revolution had truly begun! 1985