A short and condensed history of computingPart II: Birth of the electronic computer

1930-1951

The Pioneers• John Atanasoff (U.

of Iowa, USA)• Clifford Berry

(England)− ABC− First automatic

electronic computer

• Konrad Zuse (Germany)− Z3 computer− First

programmable computer

ABC Computer

Z1 & Z3 Computers

Z1BinaryElectrically drivenPunch card input

Z3BinaryProgrammableFully automatedPunched film input

Alan M. Turing (1912-1954)

• Computer scientist

• Led WWII research group that broke the Enigma machine (Colossus computer)

• Proposed a simple abstract universal machine model for defining computability: the “Turing machine”

• Devised the “Turing test” for AI

The Enigma machine and Colossus

IBM Harvard Mark I – 1944

• The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, installed at Harvard University in 1944. It is 51 feet long, weighs 5 tons, incorporates 750,000 parts

Mauchly and Eckert

• John W. Mauchly (1907-1980)• J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995)

• Headed the ENIAC team at the University of Pennsylvania

• ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), the first electronic general-purpose digital computer

• Commissioned by the Army for computing ballistic firing tables

ENIAC

• Massive scale and redundant design

• Decimal internal coding

• Operational in 1946

• Replacing a bad tube meant checking 19,000 possibilities

ENIAC

• Programming meant literally re-wiring the computer

• Slow, tedious and repetitious

John Von Neumann (1903-1954)

• Von Neumann visits the University of Pennsylvania in 1944

• Prepares a draft for an automatic programmable device (later called EDVAC)

• Concept of “stored program” instruction is a form of data and can be used in the same memory, adding great flexibility to a computer’s architecture

• Designed the IAS machine (Institute for Advanced Studies) which became operational in 1951

Von Neumann architecture

• “stored program”

• Serial uniprocessor design

• Binary internal encoding

• CPU-Memory-I/O organization

• “fetch-decode-execute” instruction cycle

Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992)

• The first real computer scientist

• Invented the first compiler because she was tired of doing it by hand, vastly improving programming speed and efficiency

UNIVAC I

• First commercial general-purpose computer

• Delivered in 1951

• Used to “forecast” the 1952 presidential election (computed statistics from polling results)

A short and condensed history of computingPart III: Age of the mainframe

1951-1970

Even in the 1950’s, computers got smaller over time

• Four different generations of tube computer circuits showing the reduction in size over several generations of systems during the 1950’s

Advances in the 1950’s

Transistor

Freedom from vacuum tubes (bulky, power hungry and unreliable)

Integrated Circuit

Place many transistors in a small area

1947

Shockley, Brattain & Bardeen

1958

Jack St. Clair Kilby & Robert Noyce

Both of these advances enabled machines to become smaller and more economical to build and maintain

Early Bell Labs transistors 1947 / 1952

The most important invention of the 20th century

Earliest implementations of the transistor

1952 – first transistor hearing aid (+2 tubes)1954 – 97% of hearing aids made only with

transistors

1954 – first transistor radio available in US

Earliest implementations of the integrated circuit

1961 – Kilby & pocket calculator1964 – Widlar & Fairchild op-amp

1960’s – IBM’s System/360

• Built using solid-state circuitry

• Family of computer systems with backward compatibility

• Established the standard for mainframes for a decade

1960’s Companion to the mainframe

• 1956 – IBM 305 RAMAC− 5 million characters

stored− Weighed a ton− Random access

• 1962 – IBM 1311− Size of a washing

machine− 2 million characters

stored− Removable disk pack

Gordon Bell, father of the minicomputer, DEC

• Developed first “Mini” computers, 1960-83

• Brought computing to small businesses

• Created major competition for IBM & UNIVAC, who only built mainframes at the time

DEC PDP series

• “minicomputers”• Offered mainframe performance at a fraction of

the cost• PDP-8 $20,000, vs $1M for a mainframe

IBM fights back!

• IBM 1130, their “small” computer, was designed to compete with DEC’s minis

Specialized supercomputers

• First developed in the late 1970’s

• High-performance systems used for scientific applications

• Advanced special purpose designs

• Control Data Corporation, Cray Research, NEC, IBM and others

A short and condensed history of computingPart IV: Age of the Personal Computer

1970-

Intel 4004 Microprocessor – 1972

• First commercially available microprocessor – first used in a programmable calculator

• Contains 2300 transistors and ran at 100 kHz• This technology made the personal computer possible

Desktop and portable computers since 1975

• Microprocessors

• All-in-one designs

• Price/performance trade-offs

• Aimed at mass audiences

• Personal computers

• Workstations

Altair 8800, the first kit microcomputer – 1975

Microsoft

Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 approached Ed Robers of MITS (company developing the Altair), and promised to deliver a BASIC compiler.

They did so, and from the sale, Microsoft was born.

Apple computers

Developed in the family garage, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs with the firs Apple Computer – 1976

Radio Shack TRS-80 – 1978

• The first plug and play personal computer available at retail

• Programmed in BASIC

• Very successful

• Very affordable

• Limited commercial software

The Apple II – 1978

• The first commercially available Apple

• Initially sold to Wall St. bankers who wanted the spreadsheet program Visicalc which ran on the Apple II

• Put Apple on the map

The Osborne I – 1981

• The first “portable” personal computer

• Came with lots of software bundled

• Only weighed 40 lbs and sold for $1,795

• Note the large 5” screen!

IBM PC – 1982

• IBM’s first PC

• Signaled a significant shift for the giant manufacturer

• Established a new standard which is still being built on today

• Open architecture

• Operating system written by Bill Gates & Co. at Microsoft

The computer company that wasn’t – Xerox

• Many of the innovations that became part of the Personal Computer scene were actually invented at XEROX Parc (Palo Alto Research Center)

• Xerox was never able to successfully exploit those innovations that included the mouse, graphic user interface and the concept of WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get)

Apple Macintosh – 1984

• First PC with GUI interface

• Adopted from the work that was done at Xerox

• Designed to be a computer appliance for “Real People”

• Introduced at the 1984 Superbowl

1984 Macintosh Ad

• Directed by Ridley Scott− Alien, Blade Runner

• Cost $1.5M• Shown only once during the 1984 Superbowl at a cost of $500K• Considered to be the best TV ad ever!• Launched the Mac in grand style!

Some of the companies that defined the Personal Computer business early on

• Xerox• IBM• Commodore• Texas Instrument• Osborne• MITS• AT&T• Compaq

• Toshiba• Hitachi• Sinclair• Hewlett Packard• Sony• Apple• Microsoft• SWTP

Comparison shopping

How do they rate in cost and performance?

Year Name Performance Memory Price Price/Performance(adds/sec) (KB) (dollars) (vs. UNIVAC)

1951 Univac I 1,900 48 1,000,000 11964 IBM S360 500,000 64 1,000,000 2631965 PDP-8 330,000 4 16,000 10,8551976 Cray-1 166,000,000 32,768 4,000,000 21,8421981 IBM PC 240,000 256 3,000 42,1051991 HP9000/750 50,000,000 16,384 7,400 3,556,188

Moore’s Law

• In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors that can be integrated on a die would double every 18 to 24 months (exponential growth)

• Million transistor/chip barrier was crossed in the 1980’s− 2300 transistors, 100 kHz clock – Intel 4004, 1971− 42M transistors, 2 GHz clock – Intel P4, 2001− 1.4B transistors inc. 4 cores and GPU, 4.4 GHz clock – Intel

Core i7, 2014

Moore’s Law

Clock frequencyF

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HotPlate

NuclearReactor

Exponential growth of technologies

Growth of a hard disk drive

Today’s Price/Performance

• Over 3 Billion operations per second costs less than $1,000

• Memory is measured in Gigabytes, not kilobytes

• Magnetic storage is measured in Terabytes

• Communication speeds are measured in Megabits per second, not bits per second

And it continues!