Evolution of Computer Technology
Table of Content:
.1 Introduction of computer
1.1.1 Definition, characteristics and application of computer
1.1.2 Evolution of Computer Technology
1.1.3 Measurement Unit of processing speed and storage unit
1.1.4 Super, Mainframe, Mini and Microcomputers
1.1.5 Mobile Computing and Its Application
1.2 Computer System and I/O devices
1.2.1 Concept of Computer architecture and organization
1.2.2 Components of Computer System
1.2.3 Microprocessor
1.2.4 Bus System
1.2.5 Primary Memory
1.2.6 Secondary Memory
1.2.7 Input Devices
1.2.8 Output Devices
1.2.9 Hardware Interfaces
Edubook Ram Kumar Sah
Many years back, the word 'computer was used to address a person who did the calculations and computing work, day in day out. Today, the computer is defined as a programmable electronic device that can store, retrieve and process data. The earliest calculating device was the abacus, after which logarithms were discovered. Here, we will discuss about history of computer.
The use of the word "computer" was firstly recorded in 1613, referring to a person who carried out calculation, or computation, and the word continued with the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. From the end of the 19th century onwards, the word began to take on its more familiar meaning, describing a machine that carries out computations.
Mechanical Calculating Era
i) Abacus: Chinese People (Before 3000 BC)
The abacus (first manual calculating device) was an early aid for mathematical computations. It is also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool used primarily in parts of Asia for performing arithmetic processes. Today, abaci are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone or metal. The abacus was in use centuries before the adoption of the written modern numeral system and is still widely used by merchants, traders and clerks in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. The user of an abacus is called an abacist.
An abacus is a device used for addition and subtraction, and the related operations of multiplication and division. There are two basic forms for the abacus: a specially marked flat surface used with counters (counting table), or a frame with beads strung on wires (bead frame).
It consists of two parts; upper parts were called earth and the lower part was called as heaven which was separated by the mid bar. The upper part usually consists of two beads on each string and the lower part usually consists of five beads on each string.
ii) Napier's Bone: John Napier (1550-1617)
The world's first practical calculator, one that could multiply divides and find square roots was developed in England during the latter part of the 16th century. Napier's bone was the invention of John Napier who was an English mathematician. Napier's Bones was also called Napier's rods, are numbered rods which can be used to perform multiplication of any number by a number 2-9. By placing "bones" corresponding to the multiplier on the left side and the bones corresponding to the digits of the multiplicand next to it to the right, and product can be read off simply by adding pairs of numbers (with appropriate carries as needed) in the row determined by the multiplier. This process was published by Napier in 1617 a book titled Rabdologia. So, the process is also called rabdology.
Figure 1.3: Napier's Bone
A rod's surface comprises 9 squares, and each square except for the top one, comprises two halves divided by a diagonal line. The first square of each rod holds a single digit and the other squares hold this number's double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, and so on until the last square contains nine times the number in the top square. The digits of each product are written one to each side of the diagonal; numbers less than 10 occupy the lower triangle with a zero in the top half.
A set consists of 10 rods corresponding to digits 0 to 9. The rod 0 although, it may look unnecessary, is obviously still needed for multipliers or multiplicands having 0 in them.
iii) Slide Rule: William Oughtred (1575-1660 AD)
William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule (first analog device in 1620 which was based on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier. Before the advent of the pocket calculator, it was the most commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering. The use of slide rules continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s even as digital computing devices were being gradually introduced; but around 1974 the electronic scientific calculator made it largely obsolete and most suppliers left the business.
Figure 1.4: Slide Rule
Slide rules come in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear or circular form with a standardized set of markings (scales) essential to performing mathematical computations. Slide rules manufactured for specialized fields such as aviation or finance typically feature additional scales that aid in calculations common to that field.
iv) Pascaline: Blaise Pascal (1623-1662 AD)
It was a calculating machine developed in 1642 by French mathematician Blaise Pascal. It could only add and subtract but gained attention because 50 units. were placed in prominent locations throughout Europe. In 1642, at the age of eighteen Blaise Pascal invented his numerical wheel calculator called the Pascaline to help his father a French tax collector count taxes. The Pascaline had eight movable dials that added up to eight figured long sums and used base ten. When the first dial (one's column) moved ten notches - the second dial moved one notch to represent the ten's column reading of 10- and when the ten dial moved ten notches the third dial (hundred's column) moved one notch to represent one hundred and so on.
Figure 1.5: Pascaline
v) Stepped Reckoner: Gottfried Von Leibniz (1646-1716 AD)
In the 1670s, German Baron Gottfried von Leibniz took mechanical calculation a step beyond his predecessors. Leibniz, who entered university at fifteen years of age and received his bachelor's degree at seventeen, once said: "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be safely relegated to anyone else if machines were used."
Leibniz extended Blaise Pascal's ideas in 1671, introduced the Staffelwalze / Step: Reckoner (aka the Stepped Reckoner), a device that, as well as performing additions and subtractions, could multiply, divide, and evaluate square roots by a series of stepped additions. Pascal's and Leibniz's devices were the forebears of today's desktop computers, and derivations of these machines, including the Curta calculator, continued to be produced until their electronic equivalents finally became readily available and affordable in the early 1970s.
Figure 1.6: Stepped Reckoner
vi) Difference Engine & Analytical Engine: Charles Babbage(1791-1871 AD) [Father of Modern Computer Science]
Difference Engine
An English mathematician and Professor Charles Babbage developed difference engine in 1822. The motivation at the beginning of the 19th century for the design of Charles Babbage's difference engines was the desire to be able to create absolutely accurate mathematical tables. Tables of standard mathematical. functions such as sines, cosines, logarithms etc. were essential to Figure 1.7: Difference Engine astronomy and navigation (which at the time depended heavily on astronomical observations). Published tables were full of errors, either from mistakes made in the calculations themselves, or introduced in the typesetting and printing process. In a perhaps apocryphal statement, when reviewing with John Herschel the errors in a newly computed set of tables, Babbage is supposed to have exclaimed "I wish to God these calculations could be done by steam!"
The method of differences is a technique for calculating tables, in which the vast majority of the calculation involves nothing more than simple addition or subtraction. The function to be tabulated is first approximated over some range by a polynomial. The degree of the polynomial depends on the desired accuracy of the table to be calculated, and on the range of the function being spanned by a single polynomial approximation.
vii) Analytical Engine
The Analytical Engine was the world's first general-purpose computer developed in 1833 by the English mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. The Analytical Engine introduced a number of computing concepts still in use today. The features included a store and mill, analogous to today's memory and processor. Input and output was provided using punched cards, based on the invention by Jacquard in the early 1800s.
Figure 1.8: Analytical Engine
Babbage began his work on the Analytical Engine in 1834. He envisaged the computer to be constructed with check equipment and powered by steam. It was never built, since the government of the day was unwilling to fund its construction, having already sunk 17,000 English pounds into Babbage's fruitless project to build an earlier invention, the Difference Engine.
viii) Lady Augusta Ada: First Computer Programmer (1815-1852 AD)
The daughter of English poet Lord Byron, Lady Augusta Ada Byron, is a British mathematician who laid some of the early conceptual and technical groundwork for high technology by helping develop an early computer. In
Figure 1.9: Lady Augusta Ada
1833 Lovelace met British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. showed her He had invented the Difference Engine, a mechanical device designed to handle complicated mathematical problems. She understanding of the concept of a programmed computer in 1842, when she translated from French and annotated a paper by the Italian engineer Luigi F. Menabrea on Babbage's Difference Engine. She also collaborated with Babbage to invent the Analytical Engine, an archetype of the modern digital computer. The technology of their time was not capable of translating their ideas into practical use, but the Analytical Engine had many features of the modern computer. It could read data from a deck of punched cards, store data, and perform arithmetic operations.
ix) Jacquard's Loom: Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834 AD)
A silk weaver, Joseph Marie Jacquard invented an improved loom in 1801. This loom was the first to use punched card system. They were used to tabulate the census of the United States. This technology was eventually used to store information in early computers. The punched-card system was replaced only with the development of magnetic storage systems beginning in the 1950s.
Figure 1.10: Jacquard's Loom
x) Tabulating Machine: Herman Hollerith (1860-1929)
Herman Hollerith was the inventor of Tabulating Machine. This system proved useful in statistical work and was important in the development of the digital computer. Hollerith's machine, used in the 1890 U.S. census, "read" the cards by passing them through electrical contacts. His Tabulating Machine Company (1896) was a predecessor to the International Business Machines Corporation in 1924.
Figure 1.11: Tabulating machine
xi) Electro Mechanical Computers
Mark 1: Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed the MARK series of computers at Harvard University. The MARK series of computers began with the Mark I in 1944. The 5-ton device contained almost 760,000 separate pieces. Used by the US Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations, the Mark I was in operation until 1959.
Figure 1.12: Mark I
The computer, controlled by pre-punched paper tape, could carry out addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and reference to previous results. It had special subroutines for logarithms and trigonometric functions and used 23 decimal place numbers. Data was stored and counted mechanically using 3000 decimal storage wheels, 1400 rotary dial switches, and 500 miles of wire. Its electromagnetic relays classified the machine as a relay computer. All output was displayed on an electric typewriter. By today's standards, the Mark I was slow, requiring 3-5 seconds for a multiplication operation.
xii) ABC (Atanasoff Berry Computer)
It was the first digital computer which was developed by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in 1942. It used 1800 vacuum tubes and other 45 vacuum tubes for internal logical and capacitors for storage of electrical charges. The punched card was used as secondary storage media in this computer.
Figure 1.13: Atanasoff Berry Computer
Electronic Computers
i) ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator)
In 1946, John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert developed the ENIAC I (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator). ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet (167 square meters) of floor space, weighed 30 tons, and consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power. There was even a rumor tha when turned on the ENIAC caused the city of Philadelphia to experience brownouts, however, this was first reported incorrectly by the Philadelphi Bulletin in 1946 and since then has become an urban myth.
Figure 1.14: ENIAC
ii) UNIVAC
The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) was the firs commercial computer produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was begun by their company, Eckert-Mauchl Computer Corporation, and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand (which later became part of Sperry, now Unisys). In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply known as "the UNIVAC".
UNIVAC, (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), the first electronic computer designed and sold to solve commercial problems. The UNIVAC contained about 5000 vacuum tubes, occupied 943 cubic feet, and weighed 8 tons. From 1951 to 1957 a variety of governmental and commercial customers bought a total of 48 UNIVAC computers.
iii) EDSAC
EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) was an early British computer (one of the first computers to be created). The machine having been inspired by John von Neumann's seminal EDVAC report, was constructed by Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. EDSAC was the world's first practical stored program electronic computer.
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Applications of EDSAC
- In 1951, Miller and Wheeler used the machine to discover a 79-digit prime -the largest known at the time.
- In 1952, A.S. Douglas developed OXO, a version of naught and crosses (tic-tac-toe) for the EDSAC, with graphical output to a cathode ray tube. This may well have been the world's first computer/video game.
- In the 1960s, EDSAC was used to gather numerical evidence about solutions to elliptic curves, which led to the Birch and Swinnerton- Dyer conjecture.
iv) EDVAC
Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer was developed by J.P Eckert and John Mauchly in 1952. It also used vacuum tubes as its memory components. The concept of a stored-program computer was introduced in the mid-1940s, and the idea of storing instruction codes as well as data in an electrically alterable memory was implemented in EDVAC .It used almost 6000 vacuum tubes, 12000 diodes and consumed almost 56 kilowatt power which covered 490 square feet area. The weight was almost 7 tons.
Figure 1.17: EDVAC
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