Computer History

• French Mathematician
• Invented a calculating machine in 1642
• 18 year old son of a tax collector,
• To assist his father in his work.
• Created a numerical wheel calculator
• A train of 8 moveable dials or cogs to add sums of up to 8 figures long.
• As one dial turned 10 notches - or a complete revolution - it mechanically turned the next dial.

• 1883 – invented the "Analytical Engine"
• An English mathematician and professor
• Sought a method to accelerate the production of log tables
• Inspired by the Industrial Revolution and the notion of "steam powered" production

• Input, output, memory and central processing unit.
• borrowed the idea of using punch cards to encode instructions acting as a stored memory.
• The "mill" acted as the central processing unit of the machine.
• Also equipped to create printed results

• Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer
• Used to produce ballistic charts during World War II
• US Army commissioned Dr. John Mauchly and John Eckert to design a electronic machine that could compute trajectory tables (1942)
• 1943, during the heart of World War II, the United States Army was seeking human ballistics computers in order to keep up with the rapid development of weapons for the war effort.
• Recruited students and graduates and discovered Mauchly's original memorandum about the project
• Realized the possibilities it held for effectively reducing the time and workload at the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory.
• University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. government joined forces
• It could do in two hours nuclear physics calculations which it would have taken 100 engineers a year to do by hand
• Later referred to as a calculator

• Howard Aiken
• Harvard University
• Looking for a method to produce Ballistics charts for the U.S. navy
• International Business Machines (IBM)
• 1 million dollar grant

First computer "bug" reported. The "bug" was an moth that
was caught up in the computer. It was discovered by naval
officer and mathematician Grace Murray Hopper.

EDVAC (1948)

• John von Neuman
• American mathematician,
• Developed the then original idea that a computer could not only store data and produce results, but that it could also store programs.

• Bell Telephone Labs in 1948
• John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley
• Originally the "transfer resistor"
• Using very small quantities of certain impurities with materials called semiconductors
• Created a tiny switch which controlled the passage of electricity
• Replaced vacuum tubes – 1/13 of the size
• Drastically reducing the size of computing machines

• The UNIVAC
• U.S. Census Bureau
• First commercial computer to attract public attention
• Manufactured by Remington Rand,
• Sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.

• Jack Kilby
• Texas Instrument Labs
• Prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.
• Circuit consisted of a sliver of germanium with five components linked by wires.

• Beginning of the Internet
• Military and Government
• Universities
• Linking computers for communication and sharing information

• 1973
• Robert Metcalfe
• Xerox Corporation
• PARC – Palo Alto Research Center

• First personal computer kit
• Ed Roberts the Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Company (MITS)
• Based on the Intel 8080 processor, capable of controlling 6 kilobyes of memory
• January edition of Popular Electronics magazine
• Unassembled kit $395
• No keyboard, no video display and no storage device
• Looked more like a radio with many switched than it did a computer.
• Named after Star Trek TV episode.

• Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
• The Alto - 1974
• Beginning of GUI - graphical user display
  • Used images and icons to desiginate commands and programs
  • Beginning of use of mouse
• Gave up on idea of graphic display and use of mouse
• The Two Steves took the idea and then started Apple

• Steve Wozniak
• Steve Jobs

• Inspired by the Alto
• Display was "graphical" - using images and icons to designnate commands and programs
• Outrageous price of the Lisa kept it out of reach for many computer buyers
• Jobs and Wozniak to begin work on an improved design that would overcome these failings

• On August 12, 1981 IBM announced its own personal computer
• Using the 16 bit Intel 8088 microprocessor, allowed for increased speed and huge amounts of memory.
• IBM PC rose as the standard in PC computing
• Newer model – IBM PC/XT

1957 - FORTRAN

• FORmula TRANslator)
• Enabled a computer to perform a repetitive task from a single set of instructions by using loops.
• First commercial FORTRAN program ran at Westinghouse, producing a missing comma diagnostic.

1960 – COBOL

 

ADMIRAL GRACE HOPPER - part of COBOL Team

 

• Common Business Oriented Language. Designed for business use
• Early COBOL efforts aimed for easy readability of computer programs and as much machine independence as possible.

• ASCII -- American Standard Code for Information Interchange
• Permitted machines from different manufacturers to exchange data.
• Consists of 128 unique strings of ones and zeros
• Each sequence represents a letter of the English alphabet, an Arabic numeral, an assortment of punctuation marks and symbols, or a function such as a carriage return.

BASIC – 1964

• Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny
• Students at Dartmouth
• "Easy to Learn"

LISP – 1969

• John McCarthy
• Originally MIT (now at Stanford)
• Writing Artificial Intelligence Programs

LOGO - Seymour Papert – 1967

 

• Designed LOGO as a computer language for children.
• Initially a drawing program
• LOGO controlled the actions of a mechanical "turtle," which traced its path with pen on paper.
• Electronic turtles made their designs on a video display monitor.

APPLE IIE

Macintosh - 1984

• Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
• Apple Computer Inc.
• Mouse
• GUI – Graphical User Interface
• Launched on Super Bowl

• 1990
• Tim Berners-Lee
• Research at CERN
• High Energy Physics Lab in Geneva
• Beginning of HTML

Bill Gates - Co-Founder