The History of Computers - UBC Department of CPSC ...cs101/2007W2/notes/lec12...• Luckily IBM...
Transcript of The History of Computers - UBC Department of CPSC ...cs101/2007W2/notes/lec12...• Luckily IBM...
Today
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
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The Abacus
The oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 BC by the Babylonians.
300 BC
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
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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
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The Calculating Clock
• First gear-driven calculating machine actually built
• Invented by Wilhelm Schickard
• Sadly, Schickard died of the plague not long after...
1623
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The Pascaline
• Blaise Pascal (19) invented this tool to help his father, a tax collector
• 50 were built, though suffered from inaccurate gears
1642
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
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The Pascaline
• Blaise Pascal (19) invented this tool to help his father, a tax collector
• 50 were built, though suffered from inaccurate gears
1642
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
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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
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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
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Jacquard’s own pattern
1801
• To demonstrate the coolness factor, Jacquard wove this self portrait
• It required 10,000 punch cards!
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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
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Charles Babbage
1820s
• 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
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Charles Babbage
1820s
• The device was never completed
• But it did gain the dubious honour of the most expensive government-funded project in English history (up to that point)
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Analytic(al) Engine
1820s
• 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 punch-card 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
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Analytic(al) Engine
1820s
• 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 punch-card 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
Memory! CPU!
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Charles Babbage & Ada Byron
1820s
• 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
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Charles Babbage & Ada Byron
1820s
• 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
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(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)
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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
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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
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Hollerith Desk
• The 1890 census?
• Took 3 years to complete
• Saved over 5 million dollars
1890s
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 I1944
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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
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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
• Today computers require less than a billionth of a second to add
• It could store 72 numbers
• Today’s computers can store nearly a billion numbers in RAM, and 10s of billions on the hard drive
1944
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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 revolution1947
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Today
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
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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
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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
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PDP-12 the mini- computer!
1969
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)
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Mainframe computers
1970s
• 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
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Key Punch Machine
1970s
• To write your program to be run in batch mode, you needed a key punch machine to prepare your punch cards
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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
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Altair 8800 (8080 microprocessor)
• The first personal computer (PC)
• Developed by MITS
• Hand to built from a mail-order kit!
1975
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Now things start taking off...
• In 1977 we see the Apple II (sometimes written Apple ][)
• This was the first mass-produced Apple machine
1977
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Now things start taking off...
• By 1981 we have the IBM PC Home Computer
• As well as MS-DOS
1977
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Apple Macintosh
• “Never trust a computer you cannot lift!”
• One of the most famous TV commercials ever made...
1984
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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