Lecture 2 History/Evolution of Computers CSCS100 - Fall 2009 – Forman Christian College Asher Imtiaz *Several of these slides have been adapted and modified from LUMS CS101 course (Dr Sohaib Khan and Dr Arif Zaman), VU CS101 slides (Dr. Altaf A. Khan) and Peter Norton’s supplementary material.

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” Pearl Buck

Goals To look at how computers evolved to take the form that they have today. To discuss key milestones in the history of computers to: Learn lessons from the successes, as well as failures Discover patterns of evolution Draw inspiration for the future

Abacus – Computer? Not really a computer, but rather a computing aid

Babbage’s Analytical Engine First Mechanical, Digital, general-purpose computer Crank-driven Store instructions Perform mathematical calculations Store information permanently in punched cards Components: input, memory, processor, output Image credits: copyright©

Jacquard Loom – A Real Computer? Intricate textile patterns were prized in France in early 1800s. Invented by Frenchman Jacquard for storing weaved patterns for textile looms (“khadian”) Jacquard’s loom (1805-6) used punched cards to allow only some rods to bring the thread into the loom on each shuttle pass. Their value for storing computer- related information was later realized by the early computer builders Punched cards were replaced by magnetic storage only in the early 1950s Slide Credit: Prof Slotterbeck, Hiram College

Jacquard Loom Slide Credit: Prof Slotterbeck, Hiram College

Protests against Jacquard’s Invention Hand weavers saw the automatic loom as a threat to their livelihood They burned several of the new machines A few weavers even physically assaulted Jacquard

Ada, Countess of Lovelace ( ) Babbage: the father of computing Ada: the mother? Wrote a program for computing the Bernoulli’s sequence on the Analytical Engine - world’s 1st computer program Ada? A programming language specifically designed by the US Dept of Defense for developing military applications was named Ada to honor her contributions towards computing

Vacuum Tube – 1904 John Fleming, an English Physicist Electronic devices, consist of 2 or more electrodes encased in a glass or metal tube Used in the construction of earlier computers Now replaced by transistors - more reliable and less costly. Source:

ABC – 1939 Attanasoff-Berry Computer (John Attanasoff & Clifford Berry at Iowa State College) World’s first electronic computer The first computer that used binary numbers Used for solving equations

Harvard Mark 1 – 1943 Howard Aiken of Harvard University The first program controlled machine Included all the ideas proposed by Babbage for the Analytical Engine The last famous electromechanical computer Source:

ENIAC – 1946 Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer World’s first large-scale, general-purpose electronic computer Built by John Mauchly & John Echert at the University of Pennsylvania Developed for military applications 5,000 operations/sec, tubes, 30 ton 9’ x 80’ 150 kilowatts: Used to dim the lights in the City of Philadelphia down when it ran Source:

Transistor – 1947 Invented by Shockly, Bardeen, and Brattain at the Bell Labs in the US Compared to vacuum tubes: much smaller size more reliability much lower power consumption much lower cost All modern computers are made of miniaturized transistors For this discovery they won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.1956 Nobel Prize in physics IC on Intel chip:

From Tubes to Transistors and beyond Tubes replaced mechanicals Transistors replaced tubes What is going to replace the transistors? What's the next big thing?

Floppy Disk Invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Yoshiro Nakamats Provided faster access to programs and data as compared with magnetic tape

UNIVAC UNIVersal Automatic Computer Echert & Mauchly Computer Company First computer designed for commercial applications First computer that could not only manipulate numbers but text data as well Max speed: 1905 operations/sec Cost: US$1,000, tubes. 943 cu ft. 8 tons. 100 kilowatts Between , 48 were sold

ARPANET A network of networks The grand-daddy of the today’s global Internet A network of around 60,000 computers developed by the US Dept of Defense to facilitate communications between research organizations and universities

Intel The first microprocessor Microprocessor: A complete computer on a chip Speed: 750 kHz

Altair The commercially available 1st PC Based on the Intel 8080 Cost $397 Had 256 bytes of memory; my PC at home has a million times more RAM (Random Access Memory)

Cray The first commercial supercomputer Supercomputers are state-of- the-art machines designed to perform calculations as fast as the current technology allows Used to solve extremely complex tasks: weather prediction, simulation of atomic explosions; aircraft design; movie animation Cray 1 could do 167 million calculations a second; the current state-of the-art machines can do many trillion (1012) calculations per second

IBM PC & MS DOS IBM PC: The tremendously popular PC; precursor of 95% of the PC’s in use today. MS DOS: The tremendously popular operating system that came bundled with the IBM PC

Apple Macintosh Based on the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing Device) ideas first developed for the Star computer at Xerox PARC (1981) The first popular, user-friendly, WIMP-based PC

World Wide Web Tim Berners Lee – British physicist 1989 – At the European Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN) in Geneva The 1st major browser “Mosaic” was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Deep Blue -vs- Kasparov In 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputer designed by IBM, beat Gary Kasparov, the World Chess Champion That computer was exceptionally fast, did not get tired or bored. It just kept on analyzing the situation and kept on searching until it found the perfect move from its list of possible moves

The next milestone? Mechanical computing Electro-mechanical computing Vacuum tube computing Transistor computing (the current state-of the-art) Quantum computing

The Future – Quantum Computing? QUANTUM MECHANICS is the branch of physics which describes the activity of subatomic particles, i.e. the particles that make up atoms Quantum computers may one day be millions of times more efficient than the current state-of-the-art computers. For example, finding the largest from a list of four numbers: current computers require on average 2 to 3 steps to get to the answer Whereas, the quantum computer may be able to do that in a single step Suggested reading: