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Period: Feb 27, 1500 to
History of Computer
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Period: to
The word "computer" was first used
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commercial calculator
While Tomas of Colmar was developing the first successful commercial calculator, Charles Babbage realized as early as 1812 that many long computations consisted of operations that were regularly repeated. He theorized that it must be possible to design a calculating machine which could do these operations automatically. He produced a prototype of this "difference engine" by 1822 and with the help of the British government started work on the full machine in 1823. It was intended to be steam-powe -
The Conditional
In 1833, Babbage ceased working on the difference engine because he had a better idea. His new idea was to build an "analytical engine." The analytical engine was a real parallel decimal computer which would operate on words of 50 decimals and was able to store 1000 such numbers. The machine would include a number of built-in operations such as conditional control, which allowed the instructions for the machine to be executed in a specific order rather than in numerical order. The instructions f -
Herman Hollerith
A step toward automated computation was the introduction of punched cards, which were first successfully used in connection with computing in 1890 by Herman Hollerith working for the U.S. Census Bureau. He developed a device which could automatically read census information which had been punched onto card. Surprisingly, he did not get the idea from the work of Babbage, but rather from watching a train conductor punch tickets. As a result of his invention, reading errors were consequently greatl -
Alan Turing
Meanwhile, over in Great Britain, the British mathematician Alan Turing wrote a paper in 1936 entitled On Computable Numbers in which he described a hypothetical device, a Turing machine, that presaged programmable computers. The Turing machine was designed to perform logical operations and could read, write, or erase symbols written on squares of an infinite paper tape. This kind of machine came to be known as a finite state machine because at each step in a computation, the machine's next acti -
Binary Representation
Hollerith's machine though had limitations. It was strictly limited to tabulation. The punched cards could not be used to direct more complex computations. In 1941, Konrad Zuse(*), a German who had developed a number of calculating machines, released the first programmable computer designed to solve complex engineering equations. The machine, called the Z3, was controlled by perforated strips of discarded movie film. As well as being controllable by these celluloid strips, it was also the first -
John von Neumann
In 1945, mathematician John von Neumann undertook a study of computation that demonstrated that a computer could have a simple, fixed structure, yet be able to execute any kind of computation given properly programmed control without the need for hardware modification. Von Neumann contributed a new understanding of how practical fast computers should be organized and built; these ideas, often referred to as the stored-program technique, became fundamental for future generations of high-speed dig -
BASIC & Other Languages
BASIC was not the only game in town. By this time, a number of other specialized and general-purpose languages had been developed. A surprising number of today's popular languages have actually been around since the 1950s. FORTRAN, developed by a team of IBM programmers, was one of the first high- level languages--languages in which the programmer does not have to deal with the machine code of 0s and 1s. It was designed to express scientific and mathematical formulas. For a high-level language, -
BASIC & Other Languages
BASIC was not the only game in town. By this time, a number of other specialized and general-purpose languages had been developed. A surprising number of today's popular languages have actually been around since the 1950s. FORTRAN, developed by a team of IBM programmers, was one of the first high- level languages--languages in which the programmer does not have to deal with the machine code of 0s and 1s. It was designed to express scientific and mathematical formulas. For a high-level language, -
Harvard Mark I
By the late 1930s punched-card machine techniques had become so well established and reliable that Howard Aiken, in collaboration with engineers at IBM, undertook construction of a large automatic digital computer based on standard IBM electromechanical parts. Aiken's machine, called the Harvard Mark I, handled 23-decimal-place numbers (words) and could perform all four arithmetic operations; moreover, it had special built-in programs, or subroutines, to handle logarithms and trigonometric funct -
Creation of Microsoft
Two young hackers were intrigued by the Altair, having seen the article in Popular Electronics. They decided on their own that the Altair needed software and took it upon themselves to contact MITS owner Ed Roberts and offer to provide him with a BASIC which would run on the Altair. BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) had originally been developed in 1963 by Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny, members of the Dartmouth mathematics department. BASIC was designed to provide an interac -
The PC Explosion
Following the introduction of the Altair, a veritable explosion of personal computers occurred, starting with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak exhibiting the first Apple II at the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. The Apple II boasted built-in BASIC, colour graphics, and a 4100 character memory for only $1298. Programs and data could be stored on an everyday audio- cassette recorder. Before the end of the fair, Wozniak and Jobs had secured 300 orders for the Apple II and from there A -
The Altair
In 1971, Intel released the first microprocessor. The microprocessor was a specialized integrated circuit which was able to process four bits of data at a time. The chip included its own arithmetic logic unit, but a sizable portion of the chip was taken up by the control circuits for organizing the work, which left less room for the data-handling circuitry. Thousands of hackers could now aspire to own their own personal computer. Computers up to this point had been strictly the legion of the mil -
Servers
The actual workings of a Web server are beyond the scope of this course but knowledge of two things is important: 1) In order to use the Web, someone needs to be running a Web server on a machine for which such a server exists; and 2) the local user needs to run an application program to connect to the server; this application is known as a client program. Server programs are available for many types of computers and operating systems, such as Apache for UNIX (and other operating systems), Micro -
The Web
The Web (or more properly, the World Wide Web) was developed at CERN in Switzerland as a new form of communicating text and graphics across the Internet making use of the hypertext markup language (HTML) as a way to describe the attributes of the text and the placement of graphics, sounds, or even movie clips. Since it was first introduced, the number of users has blossomed and the number of sites containing information and searchable archives has been growing at an unprecedented rate. It is now
