A Brief History

1
Section 5

• A Brief History
• of the
• Computer
• Ninety percent of everything is crud
• Sturgeon's Law
• Theodore Sturgeon

2
Prehistory

• 1612-1614 John Napier first used the printed
  decimal point - and invented logarithms as a way
  to simplify difficult mathematical computations.
  He used number sticks or Napier's Bones, for
  calculating

A 1965 Wang calculator advert
3
Prehistory
1620s or 1630s - William Oughtred invented the
slide rule on the basis of Napiers Logarithms
Oughtred's other mathematical contributions
include the symbol 'x' for multiplication. His
original slide rule was circular, but the more
familiar straight rule soon superseded it
4
Prehistory

• 1642 Blaise Pascal created a gear-driven adding
  machine called the Pascalene, the first
  mechanical adding machine.

He invented the machine in order to help his
father calculate taxes more efficiently. Some
things never change
5
Prehistory

• 1801 A linked sequence of punched cards
  controlled the weaving of patterns in
  Joseph-Marie Jacquards loom.

A portrait of Jacquard, woven on his loom, under
the control of a 10,000 card program
6
The First Genius

• 1822 Charles Babbage began to design and build
  the Difference Engine

7
Babbage

• 18345 Babbage shifted his focus to designing
  the Analytical Engine - a mechanical computer

8
The Analytical Engine

• Considered the first true computer system,
  although never completed. With the exception of
  the stored program concept (due to Turing)
  Babbage had invented the computer, a century
  early.
• Despite later claims, Ada Augusta Lovelace
  was not Babbage's assistant nor did she write the
  first programs for the AE. She did, however,
  describe the AE in print

9
Between the Wars

• 1935 Alan Matheson Turing began work on his
  seminal paper On Computable Numbers, with an
  application to the Entscheidungsproblem, finally
  published in 1937. Turing's formal model of
  computation (the Turing machine) invented
  Computer Science and influenced every designer
  who came after him

1937 Konrad Zuse also described the stored
program concept in his diary. Zuse later
built several electromechanical computers and was
the first to describe a high-level programming
language (Plankalkül)
10
World War II
1940 Turing and Gordon Welchman produced the
first bombe - an electromechanical machine to
assist breaking the German Enigma codes. It was
an improvement of the Polish bomba. Turing has
been acknowledged as the greatest cryptanalyst of
the 20th century perhaps of all time. His work
on the weighting of evidence virtually created
the field of mathematical cryptanalysis. Without
Turing, the Allies might not have won the war
certainly not as quickly.
11
Colossus

• 1943 After a series of prototypes (the
  Robinsons designed by Max Newman and C.E.
  Wynn-Williams), Tom Flowers, Sid Broadhurst and
  W.W. Chandler designed and built Colossus

It was the world's first electronic digital
computer and was created to break the German Fish
(not Enigma) codes. Turing was not part of the
design team, although he was aware of the work.
12
World War II

• 1945 In June John von Neumann signed the
  preliminary draft of the EDVAC (Electronic
  Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) report,
  largely written by Eckert and Mauchly, whose
  names were left off.
• Although their names appeared on the final
  report, the term von Neumann architecture (no
  matter how misleading) has survived to this day.
• Eckert and Mauchly never quite forgave von
  Neumann for not attempting to clarify the
  situation.
• In fact Eckert and Mauchly themselves were
  influenced by two Chicago neurologists, McCulloch
  Pitt, whose 1943 paper (A Logical Calculus of
  the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity) was
  influenced by Alan Turing.

13
After the War

• 1945 - The ENIAC was completed in November - late
  for the war (rather like the US itself).
• 1946 The ENIAC was declassified and unveiled to
  the public.
• The summer school held by Eckert and Mauchly
  at the Moore School of Engineering at the
  University of PA influenced a whole generation of
  computer designers.

14
The First Computer

• June 21, 1948 Manchester University's Baby,
  the world's first operational stored-program
  digital computer, ran its first program

Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams at the console
of the Mark 1
15
The First Program
"A program was laboriously inserted and the
start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on
the display tube entered a mad dance. In early
trials it was a dance of death leading to no
useful result, and what was even worse, without
yielding any clue as to what was wrong. But one
day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in
the expected place, was the expected answer. It
was a moment to remember. This was in June 1948,
and nothing was ever the same again" Freddie
Williams "...the most exciting time was June
1948, when the first machine worked. Without
Question. Nothing could ever compare with that."
Tom Kilburn, 1992.
The world's first program To calculate Highest
Common Factors written by Tom Kilburn
16
Baby Facts

• Designed by Freddie C Williams and Tom Flowers
  working under Max Newman in 1946 they had
  invented the first practical memory, the
  "Williams tube - Baby was designed to test the
  tube!
• 32-bit word length
• Serial binary arithmetic using 2's complement
  integers
• A single address format order code
• 7 instructions (no add, but a subtract)
  increased to 31 by October 27, 1948
• A random access main store of 32 words,
  extendable up to 8192 words
• A computing speed of around 1.2 milliseconds per
  instruction
• Upgraded (April 1949) to 128 40-bit words, with
  secondary storage of 1024 words on a magenetic
  drum - now titled the Manchester Mark I

17
The Second Computer

• 1949 (May) Maurice Wilkes and his team at
  Cambridge built the EDSAC (inspired by the EDVAC
  document) which was the first production (i.e.
  non-prototype) computer in the world.

EDSAC used mercury acoustic delay lines for
storage. Some of the funding had come from the J.
Lyons company (whose main business was cakes and
teashops).
18
The Pace Heats Up

• 1949 In August Eckert and Mauchly's BINAC for
  the USAF became the first working computer in the
  US and the third in the world.

19
The Pace Heats Up

• 1949 The CSIR Mark I designed by Trevor Pearcey
  and Maston Beard at the University of Sydney
  became the world's fourth computer and
  Australia's first.

The Mark 1 ran its first program in November
1949. In June 1951, at Australia's first computer
conference it played (or rather buzzed) the
world's first computer music.
20
The Pace Heats Up

• 1949-51 The Whirlwind computer (Jay Forrester and
  team), constructed at MIT was the first real-time
  computer.
• Consisting of 3,300 tubes and 8,900 crystal
  diodes it occupied 2,500 square feet of floor.
• It had a CRT graphics tube which could display
  1 dot at a time. Used for Air Traffic Control

Whirlwind's 2,048 16-bit words of CRT memory used
up 32,000 worth of tubes each month until
Forrester's invention of core memory
21
Computers for Sale

• 1951 (February) The Ferranti Mark I a
  commercially-engineered version of the Manchester
  Mark I (the grown-up Baby) was the world's first
  computer available for sale.
• The first Mark I went to Manchester University to
  replaced the Manchester Mark I
• The second went to the University of Toronto and
  was used in the design of the St. Lawrence Seaway

22
Computers for Sale

• 1951 (March) On March 31 1951, the first Univac I
  was delivered to the US Census Bureau, thus
  becoming the first US-built machine available for
  sale. It went live on June 14.

Walter Cronkite and two Univac employees on
election night 1952 The computer
successfully predicted the election of Dwight D.
Eisenhower - opinion polls had Adlai Stevenson as
the runaway winner.
23
Computers for Sale

• 1951-3 The LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) designed
  by John Pinkerton and based on Wilkes' EDSAC was
  the first commercially-oriented computer built
  and would ultimately (as the LEO II) be the first
  such offered for sale.

24
The Generations

• Generation 0 Mechanical and electromechanical
• Generation 1 Electronic tubes
  Baby, EDSAC, Mark-I, UNIVAC
• Generation 2 Transistors
• (Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley Bell Labs,
  1948)
• Cray's CDC1604 (1958/9)
• Generation 3 Integrated Circuits
• (Jack Kilby, Texas Instruments, 1958)
• IBM 360 (1964)
• Generation 4 Microprocessors
• Generation 5 ?

25
Computer Classification

• Supercomputer high performance, large scientific
  number crunching (e.g. CRAY Y-MP)
• Mainframe large, high performance, general
  purpose (e.g. IBM 3090)
• Minicomputer often tailored for specific
  applications or areas (e.g. DEC VAX)
• Largely obsolete term
• Microcomputer computer whose CPU (central
  processing unit) is a microprocessor
• Microprocessor is a central processor on a chip
  - replaced dozens of integrated circuits with a
  single chip
• Integrated circuits multiple transistors (first
  tens, then hundreds, then thousands...now tens of
  millions) on one chip