Discussion Questions

• What defines a computer:

– What is the simplest definition of a computer

you can come up with?

– What defines a modern computer?

• What was the first computer?

– If you don’t know, make a guess

Definition of Computer

Definition of a Computer

• Information Processor

• Input and Output

Definition of Modern Computer

• Inputs, outputs, processes and stores

information

• Physical: Keyboard, monitor, etc. – are

these necessary components?

The first counting device started to be used by the primitive

people. These are the sticks and stones. As technology improves

and human minds develop more and more computing devices

are invented and developed.

The first computer is really the people. “Computer” then was a

job title. Computer was used to describe human beings

especially women whose job is to perform repetitive

calculations required to compute such things as navigation

tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for almanacs.

Humans can be sometimes ineffective and inaccurate and

computing multiplications for long hours can be so boring.

Hence, mistakes in computations will arouse. That’s why

inventors made researches to find ways in computing easier

with the aid of machines.

A typical computer operation

back when computers were

people

ABACUS

Abacus is an ancient instrument used

in performing arithmetic calculations.

It can do add, subtract, multiply and

divide. It consists of tablet or frame

bearing parallel wires or grooves in

which the counters or beads are

moved. For a skilled user of abacus

he could perform addition and

subtraction in the same speed with the

person using an electronic computer.

However, multiplication and division

are much slower.

It is not in China that abacus was

really invented . The oldest surviving

abacus was used 300 B.C by the

Babylonians. Until now, China, Japan

and Korea are still using the abacus.

A modern abacus. Abacus is just a representation of the

human fingers: the 5 lower rings in each rod represent

the 5 fingers and the upper rings represent the 2 hands.

• beads on rods to count and calculate

• still widely used in Asia!

NAPIER’S BONES

Invented by a Scottish named John Napier . He first invented the

logarithms in 1617 and he got the idea from printed tables. From

the printed tables he made an alternative wherein logarithms

values are carved on ivory sticks .

SLIDE RULEA slide rule can do very difficult calculations engineers and

architects were using it before in calculations. Three men

developed the slide rule and they were Edmund Gunter, William

Oughtred, and Robert Bissaker. It was in 1632 when slide rule

was first built in England. It was used in the 1960s by engineers

of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs which landed men on

moon.

• Slide Rule 1630

• based on Napier’s rules for

logarithms

• used until 1970s

Leonardo da Vinci made had

drawn gear-driven

calculating machines but had

never built any.

SCHICKARD’S CALCULATING

CLOCKIn 1623, German Professor,

Wilhelm Schickard built this first

gear-driven calculating device.

However this device got little

publicity for its inventor died

because of the outbreak of

bubonic plague in the

Mediterranen.

PASCALINE

At the age of 19, Blaise Pascal invented

the Pascaline in 1642 for his father who

is a tax collector. He had built 50 of this

gear-driven one-function calculator,

which only performs addition. But he

wasn’t able to sell the device because of

its high cost and inaccuracy.

Pascaline uses complicated arrangement

of numbered wheels connected by gears.

Pascal continually develop his machine

until it can already perform subtraction

and addition up to nine digits long.

This is the

pascalline opened

up with gears and

cylinders which

rotated to show

the numerical

result

STEPPED RECKONERGottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz is a

German mathematician who discovered

the fundamental principles in

infinitesimal calculus.

In 1672, Leibniz invented a calculating

machine which he called the stepped

reckoner. He called it a stepped reckoner

for instead of using gears like Pascal it

has fluted drums with ten flutes arranged

around their circumference in a stair-

step fashion. It is capable of adding,

subtracting, multiplying, dividing , and

extracting roots. The device uses the

decimal number system.

JACQUARD’S LOOM

In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard , a French

inventor developed the power loom. The

Jacquard’s loom works by using wooden

punched cards held together in a rope to

program patterns in order to create woven

fabrics. The presence or absence of each

hole in the card physically allows a colored

thread to pass or stop the thread.

A close up of a

Jacquard punched

card

• first stored program -

metal cards

• first computer

manufacturing

• still in use today!

Jacquard’s Loom

DIFFERENCE ENGINECharles Babbage designed this steam

driven calculating machine about the

size of the room. The machine

intended to solve tables of numbers,

such as logarithm tables which was

use in navigations. The difference

engine should be capable or

calculating 20-decimal capacity of

solving mathematical problems.

The machine was greatly funded by

the British government to be used by

the Navy. Unfortunately, even though

a lot of money was put into the

completion of the machine it was

never been finished.

Charles Babbage - 1792-1871

• Difference Engine c.1822

– huge calculator, never finished

• Analytical Engine 1833

– could store numbers

– calculating “mill” used punched

metal cards for instructions

– powered by steam!

– accurate to six decimal places

This is only a small

section of Babbage’s

difference engine

ANALYTICAL ENGINEAgain, Charles Babbage conceived a new machine, called the

analytical engine. He got the mechanism of Jacquard’s loom. The

punched card technology was used in this machine and Babbage

improved it. The analytical engine is programmable, it is as large

as a house with 6 steam engines. It is capable of performing

mathematical calculations, storing information by using punched

cards as a permanent memory. This machine also uses conditional

statement to perform calculations.

Babbage befriended Ada Byron for the fashioning programs of

the Analytical engine. However when Ada had already made plans

and notes for the machine, Babbage refused to publish his ideas.

The British government refused to fund Babbage’s machine and

remain unbuilt. It was only in 1833 that the machine was

constructed but then only a part of it was finished.

LADY ADA AUGUSTA BYRON

KINGShe is the very first computer programmer. A daughter of

the famous poet Lord Byron. She became the Countess

Lady Lovelace. At the age of 19, she already got interested

in Babbage’s ideas of the Analytical Engine. Ada and

Babbage had communicated through letters and meetings

and had studied for the programming of the engine. She

wrote a series of notes wherein she detailed sequences of

instructions she had prepared for the analytical engine.

HOLLERITH’S TABULATING

MACHINE Herman Hollerith, an American engineer who

invented the Hollerith desk. He used the same

idea in Jacquard’s loom. The machine

consisted of a card reader which sensed the

holes in the card, a gear driven mechanism

which could count using Pascal’s mechanism

and a large wall of dial indicators to display

the result of the count.

Hollerith’s invention was used in the 1890

U.S. Census . Hollerith’s desk made

computational time faster. He developed the

Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company

which was later changed in 1924 by the name

International Business Machines(IBM).

The operator

working with the

Hollerith's desk

The Hollerith's

desk

Women preparing punched cards for the U.S.

Census

One of Hollerith’s desk still existing

today

Hollerith’s tabulating

machine was the very

first machine to be on

the cover of a

magazine

Discussion Question

• What was the biggest advance that led to

modern computers?

– Electricity

– Transistor

– Microchip

– Data storage

Vacuum Tubes - 1941 - 1956

• First Generation Electronic

Computers used Vacuum Tubes

• Vacuum tubes are glass tubes with

circuits inside.

• Vacuum tubes have no air inside of

them, which protects the circuitry.

ENIAC -

1946

ENIAC was short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. It was the first general purpose (programmable to solve any problem) electric computer. It contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 27 tones and drew 150 kW of power to operate.Created at the University of Pennsylvania Cost $487,000

UNIVAC -

1951

First commercial computer - Between 1951 and 1958, 47 UNIVAC I computers were delivered.

25 feet by 50 feet in

size

5,600 tubes,

18,000 crystal diodes

300 relays

Internal storage

capacity of 1,008

fifteen bit words was

achieved using 126

mercury delay lines

Grace Hopper

• Programmed UNIVAC

• Recipient of Computer

Science’s first “Man of the

Year Award”

First Computer Bug - 1945

• Relay switches part of computers

• Grace Hopper found a moth stuck in a relay responsible for a malfunction

• Called it “debugging” a computer

First Transistor

• Invented by William Shockley (seated) John Bardeen & Walter Brattain at Bell Labs.

The transistor replaced bulky vacuum tubes with a smaller, more reliable, and power saving solid sate circuit.

• Uses Silicon

• developed in 1947

• won a Nobel prize

• on-off switch

• Second Generation Computers used Transistors, starting in 1956

Second Generation – 1956-1963

• 1956 – Computers began to incorporate

Transistors

• Replaced vacuum tubes with Transistors

Integrated Circuits

• Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments & Robert Noyce at Fairchild

semiconductor independently invent the first integrated circuits or

“the chip”. Third Generation Computers used Integrated Circuits

(chips).

• Integrated Circuits are transistors, resistors, and capacitors integrated

together into a single “chip”

Operating System

• Software – Instructions for Computer

• Operating system is set of instructions

loaded each time a computer is started

• Program is instructions loaded when needed

Third Generation – 1964-1971

• 1964-1971

• Integrated Circuit

• Operating System

• Getting smaller, cheaper

The First Microprocessor – 1971

• The 4004 had 2,250 transistors

• four-bit chunks (four 1’s or 0’s)

• 108Khz

• Called “Microchip”

What is a Microchip?

• Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit (VLSIC)

– Transistors, resistors, and capacitors

• 4004 had 2,250 transistors

• Pentium IV has 42 MILLION transistors

– Each transistor 0.13 microns (10-6 meters)

4th Generation – 1971-present

• MICROCHIPS!

• Getting smaller and smaller, but we are still

using microchip technology

Birth of Personal Computers - 1975

• 256 byte memory (not

Kilobytes or

Megabytes)

• 2 MHz Intel 8080 chips

• Just a box with flashing

lights

• cost $395 kit, $495

assembled.

Birth of Personal Computers - 1975

Generations of Electronic Computers

First

Generation

Second

Gen.

Third

Gen.

Fourth Gen.

Technology Vacuum

Tubes

Transistors Integrated

Circuits

(multiple

transistors)

Microchips

(millions of

transistors)

Size Filled Whole

Buildings

Filled half a

room

Smaller Tiny - Palm

Pilot is as

powerful as

old building

sized

computer

Over the past 50 years, the Electronic

Computer has evolved rapidly.

Connections:

• Which evolved from the other, which was

an entirely new creation

• vacuum tube

• integrated circuit

• transistor

• microchip

Evolution of Electronics

Vacuum

Tube

Transistor

Integrated

Circuit

Microchip

(VLSIC)

Evolution of Electronics

• Vacuum Tube – a dinosaur without a modern

lineage

• Transistor Integrated Circuit Microchip

IBM PC - 1981

• IBM-Intel-Microsoft joint venture

• First wide-selling personal

computer used in business

• 8088 Microchip - 29,000 transistors

– 4.77 Mhz processing speed

• 256 K RAM (Random Access

Memory) standard

• One or two floppy disk drives

Apple Computers

• Founded 1977

• Apple II released 1977

– widely used in schools

• Macintosh (left)

– released in 1984, Motorola 68000 Microchip processor

– first commercial computer with graphical user interface (GUI) and pointing device (mouse)

Computers Progress UNIVAC

(1951-1970) (1968 vers.)

Mits

Altair

(1975)

IBM PC

(1981)

Macintosh

(1984)

Pentium

IV

Circuits

Integrated

Circuits

2 Intel

8080

Microchip

Intel 8088

Microchip - 29,000

Transistors

Motorola

68000

Intel P-IV

Microchip - 7.5 million

transistors RAM

Memory

512 K 265 Bytes 256 KB 256 MB

Speed 1.3 MHz 2 KHz 4.77 MHz 3200 MHz

= 3.2 GHz

Storage 100 MB

Hard Drive

8” Floppy

Drive

Floppy

Drive

Floppy

Drives

Hard

Drive,

Floppy,

CD-Rom

Size Whole

Room

Briefcase (no monitor)

Briefcase

+ Monitor

Two

shoeboxes (integrated

monitor)

Small

Tower

Cost $1.6 million $750 $1595 ~$4000 $1000 -

$2000

1990s: Pentiums and Power Macs

• Early 1990s began penetration of computers into

every niche: every desk, most homes, etc.

• Faster, less expensive computers paved way for this

• Windows 95 was first decent GUI for “PCs”

• Macs became more PC compatible - easy file transfers

• Prices have plummeted

– $2000 for entry level to $500

– $6000 for top of line to $1500

21st Century Computing

• Great increases in speed, storage, and

memory

• Increased networking, speed in Internet

• Widespread use of CD-RW

• PDAs

• Cell Phone/PDA

• WIRELESS!!!

Evolution of Computer

1990 2004 Factor

Speed 16 MHz 2 GHz 125x

Storage 20 MB 120 GB 6000x

Memory 1 MB 1 GB MB 1000x

Cost $2250 $750 .33x

What’s next for computers?

• Use your imagination to come up with what

the next century holds for computers.

– What can we expect in two years?

– What can we expect in twenty years?