Which can be used by the user? The work of processing may be the calculation, comparisons or the decision taken by the computer. When the output data is meaning it is called information.
Actually speaking electronic data processing does not go back more than just half a centaury i. In early days when our ancestor used to reside in cave the counting was a problem. Still it is stated becoming difficult.
When they started using stone to count their animals or the possession they never knew that this day will lead to a computer of today. People today started following a set of procedure to perform calculation with these stones, which later led to creation of a digital counting device, which was the predecessor the first calculating device invented, was know as ABACUS.
Abacus is known to be the first mechanical calculating device. Which was used to be performed addition and subtraction easily and speedily? This device was a first develop Ed by the Egyptians in the 10th centaury B. C, but it was given it final shape in the 12th centaury A. Abacus is made up of wooden frame in which rod where fitted across with rounds beads sliding on the rod. Heaven was the upper part and Earth was the lower one. Thus any no. As the necessity demanded, scientist started inventing better calculating device.
These rods that one can do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division easily. Ross contended that a Flexowriter -- an electrically-controlled typewriter -- connected to an MIT computer could function as a keyboard input device due to its low cost and flexibility.
An experiment conducted five months later on the MIT Whirlwind computer confirmed how useful and convenient a keyboard input device could be. For easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube. DEC is founded initially to make electronic modules for test, measurement, prototyping and control markets. Headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts, Digital Equipment Corporation, took over 8, square foot leased space in a nineteenth century mill that once produced blankets and uniforms for soldiers who fought in the Civil War.
The mill is still in use today as an office park Clock Tower Place today. The is built on a 'building block' concept which allows it to be highly flexible for many different uses and could simultaneously control up to 63 tape drives—very useful for large databases of information.
For many business users, quick access to this huge storage capability outweighed its relatively slow processing speed. Customers included US military as well as industry. Its task was to detect incoming Soviet bombers and direct interceptor aircraft to destroy them. Operators directed actions by touching a light gun to the SAGE airspace display. Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar!
More than 50 PDP-1s were sold. It was sold exclusively in Japan, but could process alphabetic and Japanese kana characters. Only about thirty NEACs were sold. It managed Japan's first on-line, real-time reservation system for Kinki Nippon Railways in The last one was decommissioned in At the top of the line was the Model , also known as "Stretch.
The mainframe, the first in the series, replaces earlier vacuum tube technology with smaller, more reliable transistors.
By the mids, nearly half of all computers in the world were IBM s. Minuteman missiles use transistorized computers to continuously calculate their position in flight. The computer had to be rugged and fast, with advanced circuit design and reliable packaging able to withstand the forces of a missile launch. When the Minuteman I was decommissioned, some universities received these computers for use by students.
The US Navy Tactical Data System uses computers to integrate and display shipboard radar, sonar and communications data. This real-time information system began operating in the early s.
System control was provided through the Atlas Supervisor, which some consider to be the first true operating system. The Control Data Corporation CDC performs up to 3 million instructions per second —three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM supercomputer.
The retained the distinction of being the fastest computer in the world until surpassed by its successor, the CDC , in Instead of designing a custom controller, two young engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation DEC -- Gordon Bell and Edson de Castro -- do something unusual: they develop a small, general purpose computer and program it to do the job.
A later version of that machine became the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. Because of its speed, small size, and reasonable cost, the PDP-8 was sold by the thousands to manufacturing plants, small businesses, and scientific laboratories around the world.
At the same press conference, IBM also announced 40 completely new peripherals for the new family. Operational by , it was not the first computerized reservation system, but it was well publicized and became very influential. It was the world's first commercial bit minicomputer and systems were sold. This printing programmable calculator was made from discrete transistors and an acoustic delay-line memory. The Programma could do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, as well as calculate square roots.
It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems. The A also marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product.
A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes into the display and keyboard unit DSKY. The AGC was one of the earliest uses of integrated circuits, and used core memory, as well as read-only magnetic rope memory.
The astronauts were responsible for entering more than 10, commands into the AGC for each trip between Earth and the Moon. The Nova line of computers continued through the s, and influenced later systems like the Xerox Alto and Apple 1. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its byte memory.
In , after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors. Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket. They did. The HP helped HP become one of the most dominant companies in the handheld calculator market for more than two decades.
The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel , appears in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the had transistors and could perform up to 90, operations per second in four-bit chunks. Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture. Under the direction of engineer Dr. Based on the Intel microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software.
Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection. In , Truong sold R2E to Bull. Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store characters as 16 lines of 32 characters.
A cassette tape interface provided supplementary storage for text. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the s. Wang was a successful calculator manufacturer, then a successful word processor company.
The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces. Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications.
In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market. The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry. It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network.
It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer. For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders.
Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines.
Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular. Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers. The banking industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or expansion. The Video Display Module VDM marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers.
Turing had proposed that ideally, having a program stored in the memory would allow the computer to modify itself at a much faster pace. Von Neumann was intrigued by the concept and in drafted a report that provided in detail a feasible architecture for stored program computing. His published paper would be widely circulated among competing teams of researchers working on various computer designs. In , a group in England introduced the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, the first computer to run a stored program based on the Von Neumann architecture.
The first modern computers were nothing like the commercial products used by consumers today. They were elaborate hulking contraptions that often took up the space of an entire room. They also sucked enormous amounts of energy and were notoriously buggy. And since these early computers ran on bulky vacuum tubes, scientists hoping to improve processing speeds would either have to find bigger rooms—or come up with an alternative.
Fortunately, that much-needed breakthrough was already in the works. In , a group of scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories developed a new technology called point-contact transistors. Like vacuum tubes, transistors amplify electrical current and can be used as switches.
More importantly, they were much smaller about the size of an aspirin capsule , more reliable, and they used much less power overall. While Bardeen and Brattain continued doing research work, Shockley moved to further develop and commercialize transistor technology. One of the first hires at his newly founded company was an electrical engineer named Robert Noyce, who eventually split off and formed his own firm, Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument.
At the time, Noyce was looking into ways to seamlessly combine the transistor and other components into one integrated circuit to eliminate the process in which they had to be pieced together by hand. Thinking along similar lines, Jack Kilby , an engineer at Texas Instruments, ended up filing a patent first. Where integrated circuits had the most significant impact was in paving the way for the new era of personal computing.
Over time, it opened up the possibility of running processes powered by millions of circuits—all on a microchip the size of a postage stamp.
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Numbers were represented in the decimal system by the positions of toothed metal wheels mounted in columns. Babbage exhibited a small working model in He never completed the full-scale machine that he had designed but did complete several fragments.
The largest — one ninth of the complete calculator — is on display in the London Science Museum. Babbage used it to perform serious computational work, calculating various mathematical tables.
In , Babbage's Difference Engine No. Three were made, a prototype and two commercial models, one of these being sold to an observatory in Albany, New York, and the other to the Registrar-General's office in London, where it calculated and printed actuarial tables.
Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, considerably more ambitious than the Difference Engine, was to have been a general-purpose mechanical digital computer. The behaviour of the Analytical Engine would have been controlled by a program of instructions contained on punched cards connected together with ribbons an idea that Babbage had adopted from the Jacquard weaving loom. Babbage worked closely with Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Byron, after whom the modern programming language ADA is named.
Lovelace foresaw the possibility of using the Analytical Engine for non-numeric computation, suggesting that the Engine might even be capable of composing elaborate pieces of music.
A large model of the Analytical Engine was under construction at the time of Babbage's death in but a full-scale version was never built. Babbage's idea of a general-purpose calculating engine was never forgotten, especially at Cambridge, and was on occasion a lively topic of mealtime discussion at the war-time headquarters of the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, birthplace of the electronic digital computer.
The earliest computing machines in wide use were not digital but analog. In analog representation, properties of the representational medium ape or reflect or model properties of the represented state-of-affairs.
In obvious contrast, the strings of binary digits employed in digital representation do not represent by means of possessing some physical property — such as length — whose magnitude varies in proportion to the magnitude of the property that is being represented. Analog representations form a diverse class. Some examples: the longer a line on a road map, the longer the road that the line represents; the greater the number of clear plastic squares in an architect's model, the greater the number of windows in the building represented; the higher the pitch of an acoustic depth meter, the shallower the water.
In analog computers, numerical quantities are represented by, for example, the angle of rotation of a shaft or a difference in electrical potential.
Thus the output voltage of the machine at a time might represent the momentary speed of the object being modelled. As the case of the architect's model makes plain, analog representation may be discrete in nature there is no such thing as a fractional number of windows. As Brian Cantwell Smith has remarked:.
James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, invented the mechanical wheel-and-disc integrator that became the foundation of analog computation Thomson []. The two brothers constructed a device for computing the integral of the product of two given functions, and Kelvin described although did not construct general-purpose analog machines for integrating linear differential equations of any order and for solving simultaneous linear equations.
Kelvin's most successful analog computer was his tide predicting machine, which remained in use at the port of Liverpool until the s. Mechanical analog devices based on the wheel-and-disc integrator were in use during World War I for gunnery calculations. Following the war, the design of the integrator was considerably improved by Hannibal Ford Ford []. Stanley Fifer reports that the first semi-automatic mechanical analog computer was built in England by the Manchester firm of Metropolitan Vickers prior to Fifer [], p.
In , Vannevar Bush, working at MIT, built the differential analyser, the first large-scale automatic general-purpose mechanical analog computer. Bush's design was based on the wheel and disc integrator. Soon copies of his machine were in use around the world including, at Cambridge and Manchester Universities in England, differential analysers built out of kit-set Meccano, the once popular engineering toy.
It required a skilled mechanic equipped with a lead hammer to set up Bush's mechanical differential analyser for each new job. Subsequently, Bush and his colleagues replaced the wheel-and-disc integrators and other mechanical components by electromechanical, and finally by electronic, devices.
Each box performs a fundamental process, for example addition, multiplication of a variable by a constant, and integration. In setting up the machine for a given task, boxes are connected together so that the desired set of fundamental processes is executed. Since all the boxes work in parallel, an electronic differential analyser solves sets of equations very quickly. Against this has to be set the cost of massaging the problem to be solved into the form demanded by the analog machine, and of setting up the hardware to perform the desired computation.
A major drawback of analog computation is the higher cost, relative to digital machines, of an increase in precision. However, such machines are now a rarity. In , at Cambridge University, Turing invented the principle of the modern computer.
He described an abstract digital computing machine consisting of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols Turing []. The actions of the scanner are dictated by a program of instructions that is stored in the memory in the form of symbols. This is Turing's stored-program concept, and implicit in it is the possibility of the machine operating on and modifying its own program. Turing's computing machine of is now known simply as the universal Turing machine.
Cambridge mathematician Max Newman remarked that right from the start Turing was interested in the possibility of actually building a computing machine of the sort that he had described Newman in interview with Christopher Evans in Evans [?
Here he became familiar with Thomas Flowers' work involving large-scale high-speed electronic switching described below. However, Turing could not turn to the project of building an electronic stored-program computing machine until the cessation of hostilities in Europe in During the wartime years Turing did give considerable thought to the question of machine intelligence.
Colleagues at Bletchley Park recall numerous off-duty discussions with him on the topic, and at one point Turing circulated a typewritten report now lost setting out some of his ideas. One of these colleagues, Donald Michie who later founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh , remembers Turing talking often about the possibility of computing machines 1 learning from experience and 2 solving problems by means of searching through the space of possible solutions, guided by rule-of-thumb principles Michie in interview with Copeland, At Bletchley Park Turing illustrated his ideas on machine intelligence by reference to chess.
Michie recalls Turing experimenting with heuristics that later became common in chess programming in particular minimax and best-first. Further information about Turing and the computer, including his wartime work on codebreaking and his thinking about artificial intelligence and artificial life, can be found in Copeland With some exceptions — including Babbage's purely mechanical engines, and the finger-powered National Accounting Machine - early digital computing machines were electromechanical.
These operate relatively slowly, whereas the basic components of an electronic computer — originally vacuum tubes valves — have no moving parts save electrons and so operate extremely fast.
To Zuse belongs the honour of having built the first working general-purpose program-controlled digital computer. This machine, later called the Z3, was functioning in A program-controlled computer, as opposed to a stored-program computer, is set up for a new task by re-routing wires, by means of plugs etc.
Relays were too slow and unreliable a medium for large-scale general-purpose digital computation although Aiken made a valiant effort. It was the development of high-speed digital techniques using vacuum tubes that made the modern computer possible.
0コメント