Dannelly's Short History of Computing CSCI327 Social Implications of Computing

In the beginning… Pascal created a calculator in 1652 able to add and subtract  A = A + B photos from en.wikipedia.org

Charles Babbage ( ) Math Tables Problem Difference Engine and Analytical Engines  Abilities add subtract loop conditional branch etc…  instructions on punched cards  data cards and instructions were separated

Harvard Mark 1 mechanical completed in 1943 used to compute artillery tables instructions on paper tape storage = 72 registers

Digital Electronics 101 circuits are a series of "gates" gates can perform AND, OR, NOT, etc Example - Half Adder: AND XOR Apple's iPad uses the A4 system chip with 177 million transistors

First Generation based on vacuum tubes ENIAC  Univ of Pennsylvania  base 10, not binary  programmed via wires EDVAC  based on ENIAC  program stored in memory UNIVAC  1951  first commercial machine  46 were made

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper Harvard Mark II  "bug in the program" UNIVAC  wrote first compiler influenced COBOL  programming languages should be closer to English than machine code

Second Generation based on transistors FORTRAN and COBOL IO Processors overlapping the fetch and execute cycles Bell Labs Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley Noble Prize in 1956

Second Generation… This IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit held 2.8 MB of data. Lease = $2100 per month The IBM 1401 Mainframe leased for about $2500 per month in 1960.

Third Generation based on Integrated Circuits mainframes and minicomputers  IBM equally suited for business or science 3 ALUs - fixed-point, decimal, floating-point bit general registers from 8K to 8M of memory

Fourth Generation based on VLSI  hundreds of thousands of semiconductors per chip microcomputers  IBM PC released in

Fifth Generation massively parallel computers  supercomputers still not in everyone's home Possible Revision of "5 th Generation"  maybe it was the internet-ization of every device  maybe it was mobile-ization of every device, thanks to Lithium-Ion batteries allowing smaller devices

Moore's Law computing power doubles every two years

Possible Future : Quantum Computing Classical Mechanics  an object in motion stays in motion blah blah Quantum Mechanics  a particle can be in two places at once  two particles can be "entangled" regardless of distance or time  there are parallel universes Quantum Computer  based on Qubits  can be 1, or 0, or 1 and 0 at the same time  computational complexity is no longer relevant  data transfer would be instant  very good at decoding encrypted messages

Stages of a New Technology becoming Viable 1.Critical Price 2.Critical Mass 3.Displacement of Another Technology 4.Nearly Free Example : Voice Over IP 1.high speed internet connection cost less $ 2.over 20% of households get high speed 3.international calls made over internet 4.talking to someone in India nearly free via Skype

The Internet ARPANET  started in 1967  fault tolerant  packet-switched TCP/IP enables a network of networks application DNS introduced with 1000 nodes first web server birth of Google Inc. 

E-Commerce Third quarter 2015 retail e-commerce was $87.5 Billion.  7.4% of total retail sales. Q retail e-commerce was 15.1% higher than Q  Total retail sales increased 1.6% in same period.

Google Revenue by Source

Past Trends and the Future

Next Class... Intro to Ethics  "morality" / "ethics"  relativism / utilitarianism