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History of computing hardware
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From early calculation aids to modern day computers
Computing hardware is a platform for information processing.
History of computing
Ordinateurs centraux 348-3-006.jpg
Hardware
* Hardware before 1960
* Hardware 1960s to present
Software
* Software
* Unix
* Free software and open-source software
Computer science
* Artificial intelligence
* Compiler construction
* Early computer science
* Operating systems
* Programming languages
* Prominent pioneers
* Software engineering
Modern concepts
* General-purpose CPUs
* Graphical user interface
* Internet
* Laptops
* Personal computers
* Video games
* World Wide Web
By country
* Bulgaria
* Eastern Bloc
* Poland
* Romania
* Soviet Union
* Yugoslavia
Timeline of computing
* before 1950
* 1950-1979
* 1980-1989
* 1990-1999
* 2000-2009
* 2010-2019
* 2020-present
* more timelines ...
Glossary of computer science
* Category
* v
* t
* e
Parts from four early computers, 1962. From left to right: ENIAC board,
EDVAC board, ORDVAC board, and BRLESC-I board, showing the trend toward
miniaturization.
The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early
simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers. Before the
20th century, most calculations were done by humans.
The first aids to computation were purely mechanical devices which
required the operator to set up the initial values of an elementary
arithmetic operation, then manipulate the device to obtain the result.
Later, computers represented numbers in a continuous form (e.g.
distance along a scale, rotation of a shaft, or a voltage). Numbers
could also be represented in the form of digits, automatically
manipulated by a mechanism. Although this approach generally required
more complex mechanisms, it greatly increased the precision of results.
The development of transistor technology and then the integrated
circuit chip led to a series of breakthroughs, starting with transistor
computers and then integrated circuit computers, causing digital
computers to largely replace analog computers.
Metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) large-scale integration (LSI) then
enabled semiconductor memory and the microprocessor, leading to another
key breakthrough, the miniaturized personal computer (PC), in the
1970s. The cost of computers gradually became so low that personal
computers by the 1990s, and then mobile computers (smartphones and
tablets) in the 2000s, became ubiquitous.
[ ]
Contents
* 1 Early devices
+ 1.1 Ancient and medieval
+ 1.2 Renaissance calculating tools
+ 1.3 Mechanical calculators
+ 1.4 Punched-card data processing
+ 1.5 Calculators
* 2 First general-purpose computing device
* 3 Analog computers
* 4 Advent of the digital computer
+ 4.1 Electromechanical computers
+ 4.2 Digital computation
+ 4.3 Electronic data processing
+ 4.4 The electronic programmable computer
* 5 Stored-program computer
+ 5.1 Theory
+ 5.2 Manchester Baby
+ 5.3 Manchester Mark 1
+ 5.4 EDSAC
+ 5.5 EDVAC
+ 5.6 Commercial computers
+ 5.7 Microprogramming
* 6 Magnetic memory
* 7 Early digital computer characteristics
* 8 Transistor computers
+ 8.1 Transistor peripherals
+ 8.2 Transistor supercomputers
* 9 Integrated circuit computers
* 10 Semiconductor memory
* 11 Microprocessor computers
* 12 Epilogue
* 13 See also
* 14 Notes
* 15 References
* 16 Further reading
* 17 External links
Early devices[edit]
See also: Timeline of computing hardware before 1950
Ancient and medieval[edit]
The Ishango bone is thought to be a Paleolithic tally stick.^[a]
Suanpan (the number represented on this abacus is 6,302,715,408)
Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years,
mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers. The earliest
counting device was probably a form of tally stick. The Lebombo bone
from the mountains between Eswatini and South Africa may be the oldest
known mathematical artifact.^[2] It dates from 35,000 BCE and consists
of 29 distinct notches that were deliberately cut into a baboon's
fibula.^[3]^[4] Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile
Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented
counts of items, probably livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked
clay containers.^[b]^[6]^[c] The use of counting rods is one example.
The abacus was early used for arithmetic tasks. What we now call the
Roman abacus was used in Babylonia as early as c. 2700-2300 BC. Since
then, many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been
invented. In a medieval European counting house, a checkered cloth
would be placed on a table, and markers moved around on it according to
certain rules, as an aid to calculating sums of money.
Several analog computers were constructed in ancient and medieval times
to perform astronomical calculations. These included the astrolabe and
Antikythera mechanism from the Hellenistic world (c. 150-100 BC).^[8]
In Roman Egypt, Hero of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD) made mechanical
devices including automata and a programmable cart.^[9] Other early
mechanical devices used to perform one or another type of calculations
include the planisphere and other mechanical computing devices invented
by Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (c. AD 1000); the equatorium and universal
latitude-independent astrolabe by Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Zarqali (c. AD
1015); the astronomical analog computers of other medieval Muslim
astronomers and engineers; and the astronomical clock tower of Su Song
(1094) during the Song dynasty. The castle clock, a hydropowered
mechanical astronomical clock invented by Ismail al-Jazari in 1206, was
the first programmable analog computer.^[disputed (for: The cited
source doesn't support the claim, and the claim is misleading.) -
discuss]^[10]^[11]^[12] Ramon Llull invented the Lullian Circle: a
notional machine for calculating answers to philosophical questions (in
this case, to do with Christianity) via logical combinatorics. This
idea was taken up by Leibniz centuries later, and is thus one of the
founding elements in computing and information science.
Renaissance calculating tools[edit]
Scottish mathematician and physicist John Napier discovered that the
multiplication and division of numbers could be performed by the
addition and subtraction, respectively, of the logarithms of those
numbers. While producing the first logarithmic tables, Napier needed to
perform many tedious multiplications. It was at this point that he
designed his 'Napier's bones', an abacus-like device that greatly
simplified calculations that involved multiplication and division.^[d]
A modern slide rule
Since real numbers can be represented as distances or intervals on a
line, the slide rule was invented in the 1620s, shortly after Napier's
work, to allow multiplication and division operations to be carried out
significantly faster than was previously possible.^[13] Edmund Gunter
built a calculating device with a single logarithmic scale at the
University of Oxford. His device greatly simplified arithmetic
calculations, including multiplication and division. William Oughtred
greatly improved this in 1630 with his circular slide rule. He followed
this up with the modern slide rule in 1632, essentially a combination
of two Gunter rules, held together with the hands. Slide rules were
used by generations of engineers and other mathematically involved
professional workers, until the invention of the pocket
calculator.^[14]
Mechanical calculators[edit]
Wilhelm Schickard, a German polymath, designed a calculating machine in
1623 which combined a mechanized form of Napier's rods with the world's
first mechanical adding machine built into the base. Because it made
use of a single-tooth gear there were circumstances in which its carry
mechanism would jam.^[15] A fire destroyed at least one of the machines
in 1624 and it is believed Schickard was too disheartened to build
another.
View through the back of Pascal's calculator. Pascal invented his
machine in 1642.
In 1642, while still a teenager, Blaise Pascal started some pioneering
work on calculating machines and after three years of effort and 50
prototypes^[16] he invented a mechanical calculator.^[17]^[18] He built
twenty of these machines (called Pascal's calculator or Pascaline) in
the following ten years.^[19] Nine Pascalines have survived, most of
which are on display in European museums.^[20] A continuing debate
exists over whether Schickard or Pascal should be regarded as the
"inventor of the mechanical calculator" and the range of issues to be
considered is discussed elsewhere.^[21]
A set of John Napier's calculating tables from around 1680
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invented the stepped reckoner and his
famous stepped drum mechanism around 1672. He attempted to create a
machine that could be used not only for addition and subtraction but
would utilise a moveable carriage to enable long multiplication and
division. Leibniz once said "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose
hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be
relegated to anyone else if machines were used."^[22] However, Leibniz
did not incorporate a fully successful carry mechanism. Leibniz also
described the binary numeral system,^[23] a central ingredient of all
modern computers. However, up to the 1940s, many subsequent designs
(including Charles Babbage's machines of the 1822 and even ENIAC of
1945) were based on the decimal system.^[e]
Detail of an arithmometer built before 1851. The one-digit multiplier
cursor (ivory top) is the leftmost cursor
Around 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar created what would over
the rest of the century become the first successful, mass-produced
mechanical calculator, the Thomas Arithmometer. It could be used to add
and subtract, and with a moveable carriage the operator could also
multiply, and divide by a process of long multiplication and long
division.^[24] It utilised a stepped drum similar in conception to that
invented by Leibniz. Mechanical calculators remained in use until the
1970s.
Punched-card data processing[edit]
In 1804, French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard developed a loom in which
the pattern being woven was controlled by a paper tape constructed from
punched cards. The paper tape could be changed without changing the
mechanical design of the loom. This was a landmark achievement in
programmability. His machine was an improvement over similar weaving
looms. Punched cards were preceded by punch bands, as in the machine
proposed by Basile Bouchon. These bands would inspire information
recording for automatic pianos and more recently numerical control
machine tools.
IBM punched-card accounting machines, 1936
In the late 1880s, the American Herman Hollerith invented data storage
on punched cards that could then be read by a machine.^[25] To process
these punched cards, he invented the tabulator and the keypunch
machine. His machines used electromechanical relays and counters.^[26]
Hollerith's method was used in the 1890 United States Census. That
census was processed two years faster than the prior census had
been.^[27] Hollerith's company eventually became the core of IBM.
By 1920, electromechanical tabulating machines could add, subtract, and
print accumulated totals.^[28] Machine functions were directed by
inserting dozens of wire jumpers into removable control panels. When
the United States instituted Social Security in 1935, IBM punched-card
systems were used to process records of 26 million workers.^[29]
Punched cards became ubiquitous in industry and government for
accounting and administration.
Leslie Comrie's articles on punched-card methods and W. J. Eckert's
publication of Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation in 1940,
described punched-card techniques sufficiently advanced to solve some
differential equations^[30] or perform multiplication and division
using floating-point representations, all on punched cards and unit
record machines. Such machines were used during World War II for
cryptographic statistical processing, as well as a vast number of
administrative uses. The Astronomical Computing Bureau, Columbia
University, performed astronomical calculations representing the state
of the art in computing.^[31]^[32]
Calculators[edit]
Main article: Calculator
The Curta calculator could also do multiplication and division.
By the 20th century, earlier mechanical calculators, cash registers,
accounting machines, and so on were redesigned to use electric motors,
with gear position as the representation for the state of a variable.
The word "computer" was a job title assigned to primarily women who
used these calculators to perform mathematical calculations.^[33] By
the 1920s, British scientist Lewis Fry Richardson's interest in weather
prediction led him to propose human computers and numerical analysis to
model the weather; to this day, the most powerful computers on Earth
are needed to adequately model its weather using the Navier-Stokes
equations.^[34]
Companies like Friden, Marchant Calculator and Monroe made desktop
mechanical calculators from the 1930s that could add, subtract,
multiply and divide.^[35] In 1948, the Curta was introduced by Austrian
inventor Curt Herzstark. It was a small, hand-cranked mechanical
calculator and as such, a descendant of Gottfried Leibniz's Stepped
Reckoner and Thomas' Arithmometer.
The world's first all-electronic desktop calculator was the British
Bell Punch ANITA, released in 1961.^[36]^[37] It used vacuum tubes,
cold-cathode tubes and Dekatrons in its circuits, with 12 cold-cathode
"Nixie" tubes for its display. The ANITA sold well since it was the
only electronic desktop calculator available, and was silent and quick.
The tube technology was superseded in June 1963 by the U.S.
manufactured Friden EC-130, which had an all-transistor design, a stack
of four 13-digit numbers displayed on a 5-inch (13 cm) CRT, and
introduced reverse Polish notation (RPN).
First general-purpose computing device[edit]
Main article: Analytical Engine
A portion of Babbage's Difference Engine
Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath,
originated the concept of a programmable computer. Considered the
"father of the computer",^[38] he conceptualized and invented the first
mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his
revolutionary difference engine, designed to aid in navigational
calculations, in 1833 he realized that a much more general design, an
Analytical Engine, was possible. The input of programs and data was to
be provided to the machine via punched cards, a method being used at
the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom. For
output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell.
The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read
in later. It employed ordinary base-10 fixed-point arithmetic.
The Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the
form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making
it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be
described in modern terms as Turing-complete.^[39]^[40]
There was to be a store, or memory, capable of holding 1,000 numbers of
40 decimal digits each (ca. 16.7 kB). An arithmetical unit, called the
"mill", would be able to perform all four arithmetic operations, plus
comparisons and optionally square roots. Initially it was conceived as
a difference engine curved back upon itself, in a generally circular
layout,^[41] with the long store exiting off to one side. (Later
drawings depict a regularized grid layout.)^[42] Like the central
processing unit (CPU) in a modern computer, the mill would rely on its
own internal procedures, roughly equivalent to microcode in modern
CPUs, to be stored in the form of pegs inserted into rotating drums
called "barrels", to carry out some of the more complex instructions
the user's program might specify.^[43]
Trial model of a part of the Analytical Engine, built by Babbage, as
displayed at the Science Museum, London
The programming language to be employed by users was akin to modern day
assembly languages. Loops and conditional branching were possible, and
so the language as conceived would have been Turing-complete as later
defined by Alan Turing. Three different types of punch cards were used:
one for arithmetical operations, one for numerical constants, and one
for load and store operations, transferring numbers from the store to
the arithmetical unit or back. There were three separate readers for
the three types of cards.
The machine was about a century ahead of its time. However, the project
was slowed by various problems including disputes with the chief
machinist building parts for it. All the parts for his machine had to
be made by hand--this was a major problem for a machine with thousands
of parts. Eventually, the project was dissolved with the decision of
the British Government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to complete
the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to difficulties not
only of politics and financing, but also to his desire to develop an
increasingly sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than
anyone else could follow. Ada Lovelace translated and added notes to
the "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" by Luigi Federico Menabrea. This
appears to be the first published description of programming, so Ada
Lovelace is widely regarded as the first computer programmer.^[44]
Torres Quevedo's 1920 electromechanical arithmometer, one of several
designs based on Babbage. This prototype automatically performed
arithmetic operations and used a typewriter to send commands and print
its results.
Following Babbage, although at first unaware of his earlier work, was
Percy Ludgate, a clerk to a corn merchant in Dublin, Ireland. He
independently designed a programmable mechanical computer, which he
described in a work that was published in 1909.^[45]^[46] Two other
inventors, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo and Vannevar Bush, also did follow
on research based on Babbage's work. In his Essays on Automatics (1913)
Torres y Quevedo designed a Babbage type of calculating machine that
used electromechanical parts which included floating-point number
representations and built an early prototype in 1920. Bush's paper
Instrumental Analysis (1936) discussed using existing IBM punch card
machines to implement Babbage's design. In the same year he started the
Rapid Arithmetical Machine project to investigate the problems of
constructing an electronic digital computer.^[47]
Analog computers[edit]
Main article: Analog computer
Further information: Mechanical computer
Sir William Thomson's third tide-predicting machine design, 1879-81
In the first half of the 20th century, analog computers were considered
by many to be the future of computing. These devices used the
continuously changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as
electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem
being solved, in contrast to digital computers that represented varying
quantities symbolically, as their numerical values change. As an analog
computer does not use discrete values, but rather continuous values,
processes cannot be reliably repeated with exact equivalence, as they
can with Turing machines.^[48]
The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine,
invented by Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, in 1872. It used a
system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide
levels for a set period at a particular location and was of great
utility to navigation in shallow waters. His device was the foundation
for further developments in analog computing.^[49]
The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to
solve differential equations by integration using wheel-and-disc
mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson, the brother of
the more famous Lord Kelvin. He explored the possible construction of
such calculators, but was stymied by the limited output torque of the
ball-and-disk integrators.^[50] In a differential analyzer, the output
of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a graphing
output.
A Mk. I Drift Sight. The lever just in front of the bomb aimer's
fingertips sets the altitude, the wheels near his knuckles set the wind
and airspeed.
An important advance in analog computing was the development of the
first fire-control systems for long range ship gunlaying. When gunnery
ranges increased dramatically in the late 19th century it was no longer
a simple matter of calculating the proper aim point, given the flight
times of the shells. Various spotters on board the ship would relay
distance measures and observations to a central plotting station. There
the fire direction teams fed in the location, speed and direction of
the ship and its target, as well as various adjustments for Coriolis
effect, weather effects on the air, and other adjustments; the computer
would then output a firing solution, which would be fed to the turrets
for laying. In 1912, British engineer Arthur Pollen developed the first
electrically powered mechanical analogue computer (called at the time
the Argo Clock).^[citation needed] It was used by the Imperial Russian
Navy in World War I.^[citation needed] The alternative Dreyer Table
fire control system was fitted to British capital ships by mid-1916.
Mechanical devices were also used to aid the accuracy of aerial
bombing. Drift Sight was the first such aid, developed by Harry
Wimperis in 1916 for the Royal Naval Air Service; it measured the wind
speed from the air, and used that measurement to calculate the wind's
effects on the trajectory of the bombs. The system was later improved
with the Course Setting Bomb Sight, and reached a climax with World War
II bomb sights, Mark XIV bomb sight (RAF Bomber Command) and the
Norden^[51] (United States Army Air Forces).
The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the
differential analyzer,^[52] built by H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at
MIT starting in 1927, which built on the mechanical integrators of
James Thomson and the torque amplifiers invented by H. W. Nieman. A
dozen of these devices were built before their obsolescence became
obvious; the most powerful was constructed at the University of
Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, where the ENIAC
was built.
A fully electronic analog computer was built by Helmut Hoelzer in 1942
at Peenemuende Army Research Center.^[53]^[54]^[55]
By the 1950s the success of digital electronic computers had spelled
the end for most analog computing machines, but hybrid analog
computers, controlled by digital electronics, remained in substantial
use into the 1950s and 1960s, and later in some specialized
applications.
Advent of the digital computer[edit]
The principle of the modern computer was first described by computer
scientist Alan Turing, who set out the idea in his seminal 1936
paper,^[56] On Computable Numbers. Turing reformulated Kurt Goedel's
1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Goedel's
universal arithmetic-based formal language with the formal and simple
hypothetical devices that became known as Turing machines. He proved
that some such machine would be capable of performing any conceivable
mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm. He
went on to prove that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem
by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is
undecidable: in general, it is not possible to decide algorithmically
whether a given Turing machine will ever halt.
He also introduced the notion of a "universal machine" (now known as a
universal Turing machine), with the idea that such a machine could
perform the tasks of any other machine, or in other words, it is
provably capable of computing anything that is computable by executing
a program stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. Von
Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer
was due to this paper.^[57] Turing machines are to this day a central
object of study in theory of computation. Except for the limitations
imposed by their finite memory stores, modern computers are said to be
Turing-complete, which is to say, they have algorithm execution
capability equivalent to a universal Turing machine.
Electromechanical computers[edit]
Further information: Mechanical computer S: Electro-mechanical
computers
The era of modern computing began with a flurry of development before
and during World War II. Most digital computers built in this period
were electromechanical - electric switches drove mechanical relays to
perform the calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and
were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric computers,
originally using vacuum tubes.
The Z2 was one of the earliest examples of an electromechanical relay
computer, and was created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1940. It
was an improvement on his earlier Z1; although it used the same
mechanical memory, it replaced the arithmetic and control logic with
electrical relay circuits.^[58]
Replica of Zuse's Z3, the first fully automatic, digital
(electromechanical) computer
In the same year, electro-mechanical devices called bombes were built
by British cryptologists to help decipher German
Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The
bombe's initial design was created in 1939 at the UK Government Code
and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing,^[59] with
an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman.^[60] The
engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the
British Tabulating Machine Company. It was a substantial development
from a device that had been designed in 1938 by Polish Cipher Bureau
cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the "cryptologic bomb"
(Polish: "bomba kryptologiczna").
In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3,^[58] the
world's first working electromechanical programmable, fully automatic
digital computer.^[61] The Z3 was built with 2000 relays, implementing
a 22-bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about
5-10 Hz.^[62] Program code and data were stored on punched film. It was
quite similar to modern machines in some respects, pioneering numerous
advances such as floating-point numbers. Replacement of the
hard-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage's earlier
design) by the simpler binary system meant that Zuse's machines were
easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies
available at that time.^[63] The Z3 was proven to have been a
Turing-complete machine in 1998 by Raul Rojas.^[64] In two 1936 patent
applications, Zuse also anticipated that machine instructions could be
stored in the same storage used for data--the key insight of what
became known as the von Neumann architecture, first implemented in 1948
in America in the electromechanical IBM SSEC and in Britain in the
fully electronic Manchester Baby.^[65]
Zuse suffered setbacks during World War II when some of his machines
were destroyed in the course of Allied bombing campaigns. Apparently
his work remained largely unknown to engineers in the UK and US until
much later, although at least IBM was aware of it as it financed his
post-war startup company in 1946 in return for an option on Zuse's
patents.
In 1944, the Harvard Mark I was constructed at IBM's Endicott
laboratories.^[66] It was a similar general purpose electro-mechanical
computer to the Z3, but was not quite Turing-complete.
Digital computation[edit]
The term digital was first suggested by George Robert Stibitz and
refers to where a signal, such as a voltage, is not used to directly
represent a value (as it would be in an analog computer), but to encode
it. In November 1937, Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs
(1930-1941),^[67] completed a relay-based calculator he later dubbed
the "Model K" (for "kitchen table", on which he had assembled it),
which became the first binary adder.^[68] Typically signals have two
states - low (usually representing 0) and high (usually representing
1), but sometimes three-valued logic is used, especially in
high-density memory. Modern computers generally use binary logic, but
many early machines were decimal computers. In these machines, the
basic unit of data was the decimal digit, encoded in one of several
schemes, including binary-coded decimal or BCD, bi-quinary, excess-3,
and two-out-of-five code.
The mathematical basis of digital computing is Boolean algebra,
developed by the British mathematician George Boole in his work The
Laws of Thought, published in 1854. His Boolean algebra was further
refined in the 1860s by William Jevons and Charles Sanders Peirce, and
was first presented systematically by Ernst Schroeder and A. N.
Whitehead.^[69] In 1879 Gottlob Frege develops the formal approach to
logic and proposes the first logic language for logical equations.^[70]
In the 1930s and working independently, American electronic engineer
Claude Shannon and Soviet logician Victor Shestakov both showed a
one-to-one correspondence between the concepts of Boolean logic and
certain electrical circuits, now called logic gates, which are now
ubiquitous in digital computers.^[71] They showed^[72] that electronic
relays and switches can realize the expressions of Boolean algebra.
This thesis essentially founded practical digital circuit design. In
addition Shannon's paper gives a correct circuit diagram for a 4 bit
digital binary adder.^[71]^: pp.494-495
Electronic data processing[edit]
Atanasoff-Berry Computer replica at first floor of Durham Center, Iowa
State University
Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and
electromechanical equivalents, at the same time that digital
calculation replaced analog. Machines such as the Z3, the
Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the Colossus computers, and the ENIAC were
built by hand, using circuits containing relays or valves (vacuum
tubes), and often used punched cards or punched paper tape for input
and as the main (non-volatile) storage medium.^[73]
Engineer Tommy Flowers joined the telecommunications branch of the
General Post Office in 1926. While working at the research station in
Dollis Hill in the 1930s, he began to explore the possible use of
electronics for the telephone exchange. Experimental equipment that he
built in 1934 went into operation 5 years later, converting a portion
of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing
system, using thousands of vacuum tubes.^[49]
In the US, in 1940 Arthur Dickinson (IBM) invented the first digital
electronic computer.^[74] This calculating device was fully electronic
- control, calculations and output (the first electronic display).^[75]
John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University
developed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942,^[76] the first
binary electronic digital calculating device.^[77] This design was
semi-electronic (electro-mechanical control and electronic
calculations), and used about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed
in a mechanically rotating drum for memory. However, its paper card
writer/reader was unreliable and the regenerative drum contact system
was mechanical. The machine's special-purpose nature and lack of
changeable, stored program distinguish it from modern computers.^[78]
Computers whose logic was primarily built using vacuum tubes are now
known as first generation computers.
The electronic programmable computer[edit]
Main articles: Colossus computer and ENIAC
Colossus was the first electronic digital programmable computing
device, and was used to break German ciphers during World War II. It
remained unknown, as a military secret, well into the 1970s
During World War II, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park, 40 miles
(64 km) north of London, achieved a number of successes at breaking
encrypted enemy military communications. The German encryption machine,
Enigma, was first attacked with the help of the electro-mechanical
bombes.^[79] Women often operated these bombe machines.^[80]^[81] They
ruled out possible Enigma settings by performing chains of logical
deductions implemented electrically. Most possibilities led to a
contradiction, and the few remaining could be tested by hand.
The Germans also developed a series of teleprinter encryption systems,
quite different from Enigma. The Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine was used for
high-level Army communications, code-named "Tunny" by the British. The
first intercepts of Lorenz messages began in 1941. As part of an attack
on Tunny, Max Newman and his colleagues developed the Heath Robinson, a
fixed-function machine to aid in code breaking.^[82] Tommy Flowers, a
senior engineer at the Post Office Research Station^[83] was
recommended to Max Newman by Alan Turing^[84] and spent eleven months
from early February 1943 designing and building the more flexible
Colossus computer (which superseded the Heath Robinson).^[85]^[86]
After a functional test in December 1943, Colossus was shipped to
Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 18 January 1944^[87] and
attacked its first message on 5 February.^[88]
Wartime photo of Colossus No. 10
Colossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable
computer.^[49] It used a large number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had
paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to perform a
variety of boolean logical operations on its data,^[89] but it was not
Turing-complete. Data input to Colossus was by photoelectric reading of
a paper tape transcription of the enciphered intercepted message. This
was arranged in a continuous loop so that it could be read and re-read
multiple times - there being no internal store for the data. The
reading mechanism ran at 5,000 characters per second with the paper
tape moving at 40 ft/s (12.2 m/s; 27.3 mph). Colossus Mark 1 contained
1500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Mark 2 with 2400 valves and five
processors in parallel, was both 5 times faster and simpler to operate
than Mark 1, greatly speeding the decoding process. Mark 2 was designed
while Mark 1 was being constructed. Allen Coombs took over leadership
of the Colossus Mark 2 project when Tommy Flowers moved on to other
projects.^[90] The first Mark 2 Colossus became operational on 1 June
1944, just in time for the Allied Invasion of Normandy on D-Day.
Most of the use of Colossus was in determining the start positions of
the Tunny rotors for a message, which was called "wheel setting".
Colossus included the first-ever use of shift registers and systolic
arrays, enabling five simultaneous tests, each involving up to 100
Boolean calculations. This enabled five different possible start
positions to be examined for one transit of the paper tape.^[91] As
well as wheel setting some later Colossi included mechanisms intended
to help determine pin patterns known as "wheel breaking". Both models
were programmable using switches and plug panels in a way their
predecessors had not been. Ten Mk 2 Colossi were operational by the end
of the war.
ENIAC was the first Turing-complete electronic device, and performed
ballistics trajectory calculations for the United States Army.^[92]
Without the use of these machines, the Allies would have been deprived
of the very valuable intelligence that was obtained from reading the
vast quantity of enciphered high-level telegraphic messages between the
German High Command (OKW) and their army commands throughout occupied
Europe. Details of their existence, design, and use were kept secret
well into the 1970s. Winston Churchill personally issued an order for
their destruction into pieces no larger than a man's hand, to keep
secret that the British were capable of cracking Lorenz SZ cyphers
(from German rotor stream cipher machines) during the oncoming Cold
War. Two of the machines were transferred to the newly formed GCHQ and
the others were destroyed. As a result, the machines were not included
in many histories of computing.^[f] A reconstructed working copy of one
of the Colossus machines is now on display at Bletchley Park.
The US-built ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was
the first electronic programmable computer built in the US. Although
the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus it was much faster and more
flexible. It was unambiguously a Turing-complete device and could
compute any problem that would fit into its memory. Like the Colossus,
a "program" on the ENIAC was defined by the states of its patch cables
and switches, a far cry from the stored program electronic machines
that came later. Once a program was written, it had to be mechanically
set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. The
programmers of the ENIAC were women who had been trained as
mathematicians.^[93]
It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be
programmed for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000
times a second, a thousand times faster than any other machine. It also
had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High-speed memory was
limited to 20 words (equivalent to about 80 bytes). Built under the
direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of
Pennsylvania, ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to
full operation at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, weighing 30
tons, using 200 kilowatts of electric power and contained over 18,000
vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors,
capacitors, and inductors.^[94] One of its major engineering feats was
to minimize the effects of tube burnout, which was a common problem in
machine reliability at that time. The machine was in almost constant
use for the next ten years.
Stored-program computer[edit]
Main article: Stored-program computer
Further information: List of vacuum-tube computers
Early computing machines were programmable in the sense that they could
follow the sequence of steps they had been set up to execute, but the
"program", or steps that the machine was to execute, were set up
usually by changing how the wires were plugged into a patch panel or
plugboard. "Reprogramming", when it was possible at all, was a
laborious process, starting with engineers working out flowcharts,
designing the new set up, and then the often-exacting process of
physically re-wiring patch panels.^[95] Stored-program computers, by
contrast, were designed to store a set of instructions (a program), in
memory - typically the same memory as stored data.
Theory[edit]
Design of the von Neumann architecture, 1947
The theoretical basis for the stored-program computer had been proposed
by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945 Turing joined the National
Physical Laboratory and began his work on developing an electronic
stored-program digital computer. His 1945 report 'Proposed Electronic
Calculator' was the first specification for such a device.
Meanwhile, John von Neumann at the Moore School of Electrical
Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, circulated his First Draft of
a Report on the EDVAC in 1945. Although substantially similar to
Turing's design and containing comparatively little engineering detail,
the computer architecture it outlined became known as the "von Neumann
architecture". Turing presented a more detailed paper to the National
Physical Laboratory (NPL) Executive Committee in 1946, giving the first
reasonably complete design of a stored-program computer, a device he
called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). However, the better-known
EDVAC design of John von Neumann, who knew of Turing's theoretical
work, received more publicity, despite its incomplete nature and
questionable lack of attribution of the sources of some of the
ideas.^[49]
Turing thought that the speed and the size of computer memory were
crucial elements, so he proposed a high-speed memory of what would
today be called 25 KB, accessed at a speed of 1 MHz. The ACE
implemented subroutine calls, whereas the EDVAC did not, and the ACE
also used Abbreviated Computer Instructions, an early form of
programming language.
Manchester Baby[edit]
Main article: Manchester Baby
Three tall racks containing electronic circuit boards
A section of the rebuilt Manchester Baby, the first electronic
stored-program computer
The Manchester Baby was the world's first electronic stored-program
computer. It was built at the Victoria University of Manchester by
Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first
program on 21 June 1948.^[96]
The machine was not intended to be a practical computer but was instead
designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first random-access
digital storage device.^[97] Invented by Freddie Williams and Tom
Kilburn^[98]^[99] at the University of Manchester in 1946 and 1947, it
was a cathode-ray tube that used an effect called secondary emission to
temporarily store electronic binary data, and was used successfully in
several early computers.
Although the computer was small and primitive, it was a proof of
concept for solving a single problem; Baby was the first working
machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic
computer.^[100] As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of
its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop the
design into a more usable computer, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1
in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the
world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.^[101]
The Baby had a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words. As it was
designed to be the simplest possible stored-program computer, the only
arithmetic operations implemented in hardware were subtraction and
negation; other arithmetic operations were implemented in software. The
first of three programs written for the machine found the highest
proper divisor of 2^18 (262,144), a calculation that was known would
take a long time to run--and so prove the computer's reliability--by
testing every integer from 2^18 - 1 downwards, as division was
implemented by repeated subtraction of the divisor. The program
consisted of 17 instructions and ran for 52 minutes before reaching the
correct answer of 131,072, after the Baby had performed 3.5 million
operations (for an effective CPU speed of 1.1 kIPS). The successive
approximations to the answer were displayed as the successive positions
of a bright dot on the Williams tube.
Manchester Mark 1[edit]
The Experimental machine led on to the development of the Manchester
Mark 1 at the University of Manchester.^[102] Work began in August
1948, and the first version was operational by April 1949; a program
written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on
the night of 16/17 June 1949. The machine's successful operation was
widely reported in the British press, which used the phrase "electronic
brain" in describing it to their readers.
The computer is especially historically significant because of its
pioneering inclusion of index registers, an innovation which made it
easier for a program to read sequentially through an array of words in
memory. Thirty-four patents resulted from the machine's development,
and many of the ideas behind its design were incorporated in subsequent
commercial products such as the IBM 701 and 702 as well as the Ferranti
Mark 1. The chief designers, Frederic C. Williams and Tom Kilburn,
concluded from their experiences with the Mark 1 that computers would
be used more in scientific roles than in pure mathematics. In 1951 they
started development work on Meg, the Mark 1's successor, which would
include a floating-point unit.
EDSAC[edit]
EDSAC
The other contender for being the first recognizably modern digital
stored-program computer^[103] was the EDSAC,^[104] designed and
constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of
Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England at the University of
Cambridge in 1949. The machine was inspired by John von Neumann's
seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC and was one of the first
usefully operational electronic digital stored-program computer.^[g]
EDSAC ran its first programs on 6 May 1949, when it calculated a table
of squares^[107] and a list of prime numbers.The EDSAC also served as
the basis for the first commercially applied computer, the LEO I, used
by food manufacturing company J. Lyons & Co. Ltd. EDSAC 1 was finally
shut down on 11 July 1958, having been superseded by EDSAC 2 which
stayed in use until 1965.^[108]
The "brain" [computer] may one day come down to our level [of the
common people] and help with our income-tax and book-keeping
calculations. But this is speculation and there is no sign of it so
far.
-- British newspaper The Star in a June 1949 news article about the
EDSAC computer, long before the era of the personal computers.^[109]
EDVAC[edit]
EDVAC
ENIAC inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert proposed the EDVAC's
construction in August 1944, and design work for the EDVAC commenced at
the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical
Engineering, before the ENIAC was fully operational. The design
implemented a number of important architectural and logical
improvements conceived during the ENIAC's construction, and a
high-speed serial-access memory.^[110] However, Eckert and Mauchly left
the project and its construction floundered.
It was finally delivered to the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research
Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in August 1949, but due to a
number of problems, the computer only began operation in 1951, and then
only on a limited basis.
Commercial computers[edit]
The first commercial computer was the Ferranti Mark 1, built by
Ferranti and delivered to the University of Manchester in February
1951. It was based on the Manchester Mark 1. The main improvements over
the Manchester Mark 1 were in the size of the primary storage (using
random access Williams tubes), secondary storage (using a magnetic
drum), a faster multiplier, and additional instructions. The basic
cycle time was 1.2 milliseconds, and a multiplication could be
completed in about 2.16 milliseconds. The multiplier used almost a
quarter of the machine's 4,050 vacuum tubes (valves).^[111] A second
machine was purchased by the University of Toronto, before the design
was revised into the Mark 1 Star. At least seven of these later
machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, one of them to Shell
labs in Amsterdam.^[112]
In October 1947, the directors of J. Lyons & Company, a British
catering company famous for its teashops but with strong interests in
new office management techniques, decided to take an active role in
promoting the commercial development of computers. The LEO I computer
(Lyons Electronic Office) became operational in April 1951^[113] and
ran the world's first regular routine office computer job. On 17
November 1951, the J. Lyons company began weekly operation of a bakery
valuations job on the LEO - the first business application to go live
on a stored program computer.^[h]
In June 1951, the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered
to the U.S. Census Bureau. Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines
at more than US$1 million each ($10.4 million as of 2022).^[114] UNIVAC
was the first "mass produced" computer. It used 5,200 vacuum tubes and
consumed 125 kW of power. Its primary storage was serial-access mercury
delay lines capable of storing 1,000 words of 11 decimal digits plus
sign (72-bit words).
Front panel of the IBM 650
IBM introduced a smaller, more affordable computer in 1954 that proved
very popular.^[i]^[116] The IBM 650 weighed over 900 kg, the attached
power supply weighed around 1350 kg and both were held in separate
cabinets of roughly 1.5 * 0.9 * 1.8 m. The system cost US$500,000^[117]
($5.05 million as of 2022) or could be leased for US$3,500 a month
($40,000 as of 2022).^[114] Its drum memory was originally 2,000
ten-digit words, later expanded to 4,000 words. Memory limitations such
as this were to dominate programming for decades afterward. The program
instructions were fetched from the spinning drum as the code ran.
Efficient execution using drum memory was provided by a combination of
hardware architecture - the instruction format included the address of
the next instruction - and software: the Symbolic Optimal Assembly
Program, SOAP,^[118] assigned instructions to the optimal addresses (to
the extent possible by static analysis of the source program). Thus
many instructions were, when needed, located in the next row of the
drum to be read and additional wait time for drum rotation was reduced.
Microprogramming[edit]
In 1951, British scientist Maurice Wilkes developed the concept of
microprogramming from the realisation that the central processing unit
of a computer could be controlled by a miniature, highly specialized
computer program in high-speed ROM. Microprogramming allows the base
instruction set to be defined or extended by built-in programs (now
called firmware or microcode).^[119] This concept greatly simplified
CPU development. He first described this at the University of
Manchester Computer Inaugural Conference in 1951, then published in
expanded form in IEEE Spectrum in 1955.^[citation needed]
It was widely used in the CPUs and floating-point units of mainframe
and other computers; it was implemented for the first time in EDSAC
2,^[120] which also used multiple identical "bit slices" to simplify
design. Interchangeable, replaceable tube assemblies were used for each
bit of the processor.^[j]
Magnetic memory[edit]
Diagram of a 4 *4 plane of magnetic core memory in an X/Y line
coincident-current setup. X and Y are drive lines, S is sense, Z is
inhibit. Arrows indicate the direction of current for writing.
Magnetic drum memories were developed for the US Navy during WW II with
the work continuing at Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in 1946
and 1947. ERA, then a part of Univac included a drum memory in its
1103, announced in February 1953. The first mass-produced computer, the
IBM 650, also announced in 1953 had about 8.5 kilobytes of drum memory.
Magnetic core memory patented in 1949^[122] with its first usage
demonstrated for the Whirlwind computer in August 1953.^[123]
Commercialization followed quickly. Magnetic core was used in
peripherals of the IBM 702 delivered in July 1955, and later in the 702
itself. The IBM 704 (1955) and the Ferranti Mercury (1957) used
magnetic-core memory. It went on to dominate the field into the 1970s,
when it was replaced with semiconductor memory. Magnetic core peaked in
volume about 1975 and declined in usage and market share
thereafter.^[124]
As late as 1980, PDP-11/45 machines using magnetic-core main memory and
drums for swapping were still in use at many of the original UNIX
sites.
Early digital computer characteristics[edit]
Further information: Analytical Engine S: Comparison to other early
computers
CAPTION: Defining characteristics of some early digital computers of
the 1940s (In the history of computing hardware)
Name First operational Numeral system Computing mechanism Programming
Turing-complete
Arthur H. Dickinson IBM (US) Jan 1940 Decimal Electronic Not
programmable No
Joseph Desch NCR (US) March 1940 Decimal Electronic Not programmable No
Zuse Z3 (Germany) May 1941 Binary floating point Electro-mechanical
Program-controlled by punched 35 mm film stock (but no conditional
branch) In theory (1998)
Atanasoff-Berry Computer (US) 1942 Binary Electronic Not programmable
-- single purpose No
Colossus Mark 1 (UK) February 1944 Binary Electronic Program-controlled
by patch cables and switches No
Harvard Mark I - IBM ASCC (US) May 1944 Decimal Electro-mechanical
Program-controlled by 24-channel punched paper tape (but no conditional
branch) Debatable
Colossus Mark 2 (UK) June 1944 Binary Electronic Program-controlled by
patch cables and switches In theory (2011)^[125]
Zuse Z4 (Germany) March 1945 Binary floating point Electro-mechanical
Program-controlled by punched 35 mm film stock In 1950
ENIAC (US) February 1946 Decimal Electronic Program-controlled by patch
cables and switches Yes
ARC2 (SEC) (UK) May 1948 Binary Electronic Stored-program in rotating
drum memory Yes
Manchester Baby (UK) June 1948 Binary Electronic Stored-program in
Williams cathode-ray tube memory Yes
Modified ENIAC (US) September 1948 Decimal Electronic Read-only stored
programming mechanism using the Function Tables as program ROM Yes
Manchester Mark 1 (UK) April 1949 Binary Electronic Stored-program in
Williams cathode-ray tube memory and magnetic drum memory Yes
EDSAC (UK) May 1949 Binary Electronic Stored-program in mercury
delay-line memory Yes
CSIRAC (Australia) November 1949 Binary Electronic Stored-program in
mercury delay-line memory Yes
Transistor computers[edit]
Main article: Transistor computer
Further information: List of transistorized computers
A bipolar junction transistor
The bipolar transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onward
transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs,^[126] giving
rise to the "second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes,
transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less
power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Silicon junction
transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer
service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands
of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space. Transistors
greatly reduced computers' size, initial cost, and operating cost.
Typically, second-generation computers were composed of large numbers
of printed circuit boards such as the IBM Standard Modular
System,^[127] each carrying one to four logic gates or flip-flops.
At the University of Manchester, a team under the leadership of Tom
Kilburn designed and built a machine using the newly developed
transistors instead of valves. Initially the only devices available
were germanium point-contact transistors, less reliable than the valves
they replaced but which consumed far less power.^[128] Their first
transistorized computer, and the first in the world, was operational by
1953,^[129] and a second version was completed there in April
1955.^[130] The 1955 version used 200 transistors, 1,300 solid-state
diodes, and had a power consumption of 150 watts. However, the machine
did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in
the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory, so it was
not the first completely transistorized computer.
That distinction goes to the Harwell CADET of 1955,^[131] built by the
electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at
Harwell. The design featured a 64-kilobyte magnetic drum memory store
with multiple moving heads that had been designed at the National
Physical Laboratory, UK. By 1953 this team had transistor circuits
operating to read and write on a smaller magnetic drum from the Royal
Radar Establishment. The machine used a low clock speed of only 58 kHz
to avoid having to use any valves to generate the clock
waveforms.^[132]^[131]
CADET used 324-point-contact transistors provided by the UK company
Standard Telephones and Cables; 76 junction transistors were used for
the first stage amplifiers for data read from the drum, since
point-contact transistors were too noisy. From August 1956 CADET was
offering a regular computing service, during which it often executed
continuous computing runs of 80 hours or more.^[133]^[134] Problems
with the reliability of early batches of point contact and alloyed
junction transistors meant that the machine's mean time between
failures was about 90 minutes, but this improved once the more reliable
bipolar junction transistors became available.^[135]
The Manchester University Transistor Computer's design was adopted by
the local engineering firm of Metropolitan-Vickers in their Metrovick
950, the first commercial transistor computer anywhere.^[136] Six
Metrovick 950s were built, the first completed in 1956. They were
successfully deployed within various departments of the company and
were in use for about five years.^[130] A second generation computer,
the IBM 1401, captured about one third of the world market. IBM
installed more than ten thousand 1401s between 1960 and 1964.
Transistor peripherals[edit]
Transistorized electronics improved not only the CPU (Central
Processing Unit), but also the peripheral devices. The second
generation disk data storage units were able to store tens of millions
of letters and digits. Next to the fixed disk storage units, connected
to the CPU via high-speed data transmission, were removable disk data
storage units. A removable disk pack can be easily exchanged with
another pack in a few seconds. Even if the removable disks' capacity is
smaller than fixed disks, their interchangeability guarantees a nearly
unlimited quantity of data close at hand. Magnetic tape provided
archival capability for this data, at a lower cost than disk.
Many second-generation CPUs delegated peripheral device communications
to a secondary processor. For example, while the communication
processor controlled card reading and punching, the main CPU executed
calculations and binary branch instructions. One databus would bear
data between the main CPU and core memory at the CPU's fetch-execute
cycle rate, and other databusses would typically serve the peripheral
devices. On the PDP-1, the core memory's cycle time was 5 microseconds;
consequently most arithmetic instructions took 10 microseconds (100,000
operations per second) because most operations took at least two memory
cycles; one for the instruction, one for the operand data fetch.
During the second generation remote terminal units (often in the form
of Teleprinters like a Friden Flexowriter) saw greatly increased
use.^[k] Telephone connections provided sufficient speed for early
remote terminals and allowed hundreds of kilometers separation between
remote-terminals and the computing center. Eventually these stand-alone
computer networks would be generalized into an interconnected network
of networks--the Internet.^[l]
Transistor supercomputers[edit]
The University of Manchester Atlas in January 1963
The early 1960s saw the advent of supercomputing. The Atlas was a joint
development between the University of Manchester, Ferranti, and
Plessey, and was first installed at Manchester University and
officially commissioned in 1962 as one of the world's first
supercomputers - considered to be the most powerful computer in the
world at that time.^[139] It was said that whenever Atlas went offline
half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost.^[140] It was a
second-generation machine, using discrete germanium transistors. Atlas
also pioneered the Atlas Supervisor, "considered by many to be the
first recognisable modern operating system".^[141]
In the US, a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were
designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to
achieve superior computational peak performance.^[142] The CDC 6600,
released in 1964, is generally considered the first
supercomputer.^[143]^[144] The CDC 6600 outperformed its predecessor,
the IBM 7030 Stretch, by about a factor of 3. With performance of about
1 megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to
1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.
Integrated circuit computers[edit]
Main article: History of computing hardware (1960s-present) S: Third
generation
The "third-generation" of digital electronic computers used integrated
circuit (IC) chips as the basis of their logic.
The idea of an integrated circuit was conceived by a radar scientist
working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the Ministry of Defence,
Geoffrey W.A. Dummer.
The first working integrated circuits were invented by Jack Kilby at
Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor.^[145]
Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in
July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working integrated
example on 12 September 1958.^[146] Kilby's invention was a hybrid
integrated circuit (hybrid IC).^[147] It had external wire connections,
which made it difficult to mass-produce.^[148]
Noyce came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year
after Kilby.^[149] Noyce's invention was a monolithic integrated
circuit (IC) chip.^[150]^[148] His chip solved many practical problems
that Kilby's had not. Produced at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was made
of silicon, whereas Kilby's chip was made of germanium. The basis for
Noyce's monolithic IC was Fairchild's planar process, which allowed
integrated circuits to be laid out using the same principles as those
of printed circuits. The planar process was developed by Noyce's
colleague Jean Hoerni in early 1959, based on Mohamed M. Atalla's work
on semiconductor surface passivation by silicon dioxide at Bell Labs in
the late 1950s.^[151]^[152]^[153]
Third generation (integrated circuit) computers first appeared in the
early 1960s in computers developed for government purposes, and then in
commercial computers beginning in the mid-1960s. The first silicon IC
computer was the Apollo Guidance Computer or AGC.^[154] Although not
the most powerful computer of its time, the extreme constraints on
size, mass, and power of the Apollo spacecraft required the AGC to be
much smaller and denser than any prior computer, weighing in at only 70
pounds (32 kg). Each lunar landing mission carried two AGCs, one each
in the command and lunar ascent modules.
Semiconductor memory[edit]
Main article: Semiconductor memory
The MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS
transistor) was invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell
Labs in 1959.^[155] In addition to data processing, the MOSFET enabled
the practical use of MOS transistors as memory cell storage elements, a
function previously served by magnetic cores. Semiconductor memory,
also known as MOS memory, was cheaper and consumed less power than
magnetic-core memory.^[156] MOS random-access memory (RAM), in the form
of static RAM (SRAM), was developed by John Schmidt at Fairchild
Semiconductor in 1964.^[156]^[157] In 1966, Robert Dennard at the IBM
Thomas J. Watson Research Center developed MOS dynamic RAM
(DRAM).^[158] In 1967, Dawon Kahng and Simon Sze at Bell Labs developed
the floating-gate MOSFET, the basis for MOS non-volatile memory such as
EPROM, EEPROM and flash memory.^[159]^[160]
Microprocessor computers[edit]
Main article: History of computing hardware (1960s-present) S: Fourth
generation
The "fourth-generation" of digital electronic computers used
microprocessors as the basis of their logic. The microprocessor has
origins in the MOS integrated circuit (MOS IC) chip.^[161] Due to rapid
MOSFET scaling, MOS IC chips rapidly increased in complexity at a rate
predicted by Moore's law, leading to large-scale integration (LSI) with
hundreds of transistors on a single MOS chip by the late 1960s. The
application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first
microprocessors, as engineers began recognizing that a complete
computer processor could be contained on a single MOS LSI chip.^[161]
The subject of exactly which device was the first microprocessor is
contentious, partly due to lack of agreement on the exact definition of
the term "microprocessor". The earliest multi-chip microprocessors were
the Four-Phase Systems AL-1 in 1969 and Garrett AiResearch MP944 in
1970, developed with multiple MOS LSI chips.^[161] The first
single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004,^[162] developed on a
single PMOS LSI chip.^[161] It was designed and realized by Ted Hoff,
Federico Faggin, Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel, and
released in 1971.^[m] Tadashi Sasaki and Masatoshi Shima at Busicom, a
calculator manufacturer, had the initial insight that the CPU could be
a single MOS LSI chip, supplied by Intel.^[164]^[162]
The die from an Intel 8742, an 8-bit microcontroller that includes a
CPU running at 12 MHz, RAM, EPROM, and I/O
While the earliest microprocessor ICs literally contained only the
processor, i.e. the central processing unit, of a computer, their
progressive development naturally led to chips containing most or all
of the internal electronic parts of a computer. The integrated circuit
in the image on the right, for example, an Intel 8742, is an 8-bit
microcontroller that includes a CPU running at 12 MHz, 128 bytes of
RAM, 2048 bytes of EPROM, and I/O in the same chip.
During the 1960s there was considerable overlap between second and
third generation technologies.^[n] IBM implemented its IBM Solid Logic
Technology modules in hybrid circuits for the IBM System/360 in 1964.
As late as 1975, Sperry Univac continued the manufacture of
second-generation machines such as the UNIVAC 494. The Burroughs large
systems such as the B5000 were stack machines, which allowed for
simpler programming. These pushdown automatons were also implemented in
minicomputers and microprocessors later, which influenced programming
language design. Minicomputers served as low-cost computer centers for
industry, business and universities.^[165] It became possible to
simulate analog circuits with the simulation program with integrated
circuit emphasis, or SPICE (1971) on minicomputers, one of the programs
for electronic design automation (EDA). The microprocessor led to the
development of microcomputers, small, low-cost computers that could be
owned by individuals and small businesses. Microcomputers, the first of
which appeared in the 1970s, became ubiquitous in the 1980s and beyond.
Altair 8800
While which specific system is considered the first microcomputer is a
matter of debate, as there were several unique hobbyist systems
developed based on the Intel 4004 and its successor, the Intel 8008,
the first commercially available microcomputer kit was the Intel
8080-based Altair 8800, which was announced in the January 1975 cover
article of Popular Electronics. However, this was an extremely limited
system in its initial stages, having only 256 bytes of DRAM in its
initial package and no input-output except its toggle switches and LED
register display. Despite this, it was initially surprisingly popular,
with several hundred sales in the first year, and demand rapidly
outstripped supply. Several early third-party vendors such as Cromemco
and Processor Technology soon began supplying additional S-100 bus
hardware for the Altair 8800.
In April 1975 at the Hannover Fair, Olivetti presented the P6060, the
world's first complete, pre-assembled personal computer system. The
central processing unit consisted of two cards, code named PUCE1 and
PUCE2, and unlike most other personal computers was built with TTL
components rather than a microprocessor. It had one or two 8" floppy
disk drives, a 32-character plasma display, 80-column graphical thermal
printer, 48 Kbytes of RAM, and BASIC language. It weighed 40 kg
(88 lb). As a complete system, this was a significant step from the
Altair, though it never achieved the same success. It was in
competition with a similar product by IBM that had an external floppy
disk drive.
From 1975 to 1977, most microcomputers, such as the MOS Technology
KIM-1, the Altair 8800, and some versions of the Apple I, were sold as
kits for do-it-yourselfers. Pre-assembled systems did not gain much
ground until 1977, with the introduction of the Apple II, the Tandy
TRS-80, the first SWTPC computers, and the Commodore PET. Computing has
evolved with microcomputer architectures, with features added from
their larger brethren, now dominant in most market segments.
A NeXT Computer and its object-oriented development tools and libraries
were used by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN to develop the
world's first web server software, CERN httpd, and also used to write
the first web browser, WorldWideWeb.
Systems as complicated as computers require very high reliability.
ENIAC remained on, in continuous operation from 1947 to 1955, for eight
years before being shut down. Although a vacuum tube might fail, it
would be replaced without bringing down the system. By the simple
strategy of never shutting down ENIAC, the failures were dramatically
reduced. The vacuum-tube SAGE air-defense computers became remarkably
reliable - installed in pairs, one off-line, tubes likely to fail did
so when the computer was intentionally run at reduced power to find
them. Hot-pluggable hard disks, like the hot-pluggable vacuum tubes of
yesteryear, continue the tradition of repair during continuous
operation. Semiconductor memories routinely have no errors when they
operate, although operating systems like Unix have employed memory
tests on start-up to detect failing hardware. Today, the requirement of
reliable performance is made even more stringent when server farms are
the delivery platform.^[166] Google has managed this by using
fault-tolerant software to recover from hardware failures, and is even
working on the concept of replacing entire server farms on-the-fly,
during a service event.^[167]^[168]
In the 21st century, multi-core CPUs became commercially
available.^[169] Content-addressable memory (CAM)^[170] has become
inexpensive enough to be used in networking, and is frequently used for
on-chip cache memory in modern microprocessors, although no computer
system has yet implemented hardware CAMs for use in programming
languages. Currently, CAMs (or associative arrays) in software are
programming-language-specific. Semiconductor memory cell arrays are
very regular structures, and manufacturers prove their processes on
them; this allows price reductions on memory products. During the
1980s, CMOS logic gates developed into devices that could be made as
fast as other circuit types; computer power consumption could therefore
be decreased dramatically. Unlike the continuous current draw of a gate
based on other logic types, a CMOS gate only draws significant current
during the 'transition' between logic states, except for leakage.
CMOS circuits have allowed computing to become a commodity which is now
ubiquitous, embedded in many forms, from greeting cards and telephones
to satellites. The thermal design power which is dissipated during
operation has become as essential as computing speed of operation. In
2006 servers consumed 1.5% of the total energy budget of the U.S.^[171]
The energy consumption of computer data centers was expected to double
to 3% of world consumption by 2011. The SoC (system on a chip) has
compressed even more of the integrated circuitry into a single chip;
SoCs are enabling phones and PCs to converge into single hand-held
wireless mobile devices.^[172]
Quantum computing is an emerging technology in the field of computing.
MIT Technology Review reported 10 November 2017 that IBM has created a
50-qubit computer; currently its quantum state lasts 50
microseconds.^[173] Google researchers have been able to extend the 50
microsecond time limit, as reported 14 July 2021 in Nature;^[174]
stability has been extended 100-fold by spreading a single logical
qubit over chains of data qubits for quantum error correction.^[174]
Physical Review X reported a technique for 'single-gate sensing as a
viable readout method for spin qubits' (a singlet-triplet spin state in
silicon) on 26 November 2018.^[175] A Google team has succeeded in
operating their RF pulse modulator chip at 3 Kelvin, simplifying the
cryogenics of their 72-qubit computer, which is setup to operate at 0.3
Kelvin; but the readout circuitry and another driver remain to be
brought into the cryogenics.^[176]^[o] See: Quantum
supremacy^[178]^[179] Silicon qubit systems have demonstrated
entanglement at non-local distances.^[180]
Computing hardware and its software have even become a metaphor for the
operation of the universe.^[181]
Epilogue[edit]
An indication of the rapidity of development of this field can be
inferred from the history of the seminal 1947 article by Burks,
Goldstine and von Neumann.^[182] By the time that anyone had time to
write anything down, it was obsolete. After 1945, others read John von
Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, and immediately started
implementing their own systems. To this day, the rapid pace of
development has continued, worldwide.^[183]^[p]
See also[edit]
* Antikythera mechanism
* History of computing
* History of computing hardware (1960s-present)
* History of laptops
* History of personal computers
* History of software
* Information Age
* IT History Society
* Timeline of computing
* List of pioneers in computer science
* Vacuum-tube computer
Notes[edit]
1. ^ The Ishango bone is a bone tool, dated to the Upper Paleolithic
era, about 18,000 to 20,000 BC. It is a dark brown length of bone,
the fibula of a baboon. It has a series of tally marks carved in
three columns running the length of the tool. It was found in 1960
in Belgian Congo.^[1]
2. ^ According to Schmandt-Besserat 1981, these clay containers
contained tokens, the total of which were the count of objects
being transferred. The containers thus served as something of a
bill of lading or an accounts book. In order to avoid breaking open
the containers, first, clay impressions of the tokens were placed
on the outside of the containers, for the count; the shapes of the
impressions were abstracted into stylized marks; finally, the
abstract marks were systematically used as numerals; these numerals
were finally formalized as numbers. Eventually (Schmandt-Besserat
estimates it took 5000 years.^[5]) the marks on the outside of the
containers were all that were needed to convey the count, and the
clay containers evolved into clay tablets with marks for the count.
3. ^ Robson has recommended at least one supplement to
Schmandt-Besserat (1981), e.g., a review, Englund, R. (1993). "The
origins of script". Science. 260 (5114): 1670-1671.
doi:10.1126/science.260.5114.1670. PMID 17810210.^[7]
4. ^ A Spanish implementation of Napier's bones (1617), is documented
in Montaner & Simon 1887, pp. 19-20.
5. ^ Binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a numeric representation, or
character encoding, which is still widely used.
6. ^ The existence of Colossus was not known to American computer
scientists, such as Gordon Bell and Allen Newell. And was not in
Bell & Newell (1971) Computing Structures, a standard reference
work in the 1970s.
7. ^ The Manchester Baby predated EDSAC as a stored-program computer,
but was built as a test bed for the Williams tube and not as a
machine for practical use.^[105] However, the Manchester Mark 1 of
1949 (not to be confused with the 1948 prototype, the Baby) was
available for university research in April 1949 despite being still
under development.^[106]
8. ^ Martin 2008, p. 24 notes that David Caminer (1915-2008) served as
the first corporate electronic systems analyst, for this first
business computer system. LEO would calculate an employee's pay,
handle billing, and other office automation tasks.
9. ^ For example, Kara Platoni's article on Donald Knuth stated that
"there was something special about the IBM 650".^[115]
10. ^ The microcode was implemented as extracode on Atlas.^[121]
11. ^ Allen Newell used remote terminals to communicate cross-country
with the RAND computers.^[137]
12. ^ Bob Taylor conceived of a generalized protocol to link together
multiple networks to be viewed as a single session regardless of
the specific network: "Wait a minute. Why not just have one
terminal, and it connects to anything you want it to be connected
to? And, hence, the Arpanet was born."^[138]
13. ^ The Intel 4004 (1971) die was 12 mm^2, composed of 2300
transistors; by comparison, the Pentium Pro was 306 mm^2, composed
of 5.5 million transistors.^[163]
14. ^ In the defense field, considerable work was done in the
computerized implementation of equations such as Kalman 1960,
pp. 35-45
15. ^ IBM's 127-qubit computer cannot be simulated on traditional
computers.^[177]
16. ^ The fastest supercomputer of the top 500 is now Frontier (of Oak
Ridge National Laboratory) at 1.102 ExaFlops,^[184] which is 2.66
times faster than Fugaku, now number two of the top 500.^[185]
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^ Hardware software co-design of a multimedia SOC platform by Sao-Jie
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^ ^a ^b Intel 1971.
^ Patterson & Hennessy 1998, pp. 27-39.
^ William Aspray (May 25, 1994) Oral-History: Tadashi Sasaki. Sasaki
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^ Eckhouse & Morris 1979, pp. 1-2
^ Shankland, Stephen (1 April 2009). "Google uncloaks once-secret
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^ "Google Groups". Retrieved 2015-08-11.
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^ Kohonen 1980, pp. 1-368
^ Energystar report (PDF) (Report). 2007. p. 4. Retrieved 2013-08-18.
^ Mossberg, Walt (9 July 2014). "How the PC is merging with the
smartphone". Retrieved 2014-07-09.
^ Knight, Will (10 November 2017). "IBM Raises the Bar with a
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^ ^a ^b Julian Kelly, et.al. (16 July 2021) Exponential suppression
of bit or phase errors with cyclic error correction as cited in Science
magazine Physicists Move Closer To Defeating Errors In Quantum
Computation
^ P. Pakkiam, A. V. Timofeev, M. G. House, M. R. Hogg, T. Kobayashi,
M. Koch, S. Rogge, and M. Y. Simmons Physical Review X 8, 041032 -
Published 26 November 2018
^ Moore, Samuel K. (13 March 2019). "Google Builds Circuit to Solve
One of Quantum Computing's Biggest Problems". IEEE Spectrum.
^ Ina Fried (14 Nov 2021) Exclusive: IBM achieves quantum computing
breakthrough
^ Juskalian, Russ (22 February 2017). "Practical Quantum Computers".
MIT Technology Review.
^ MacKinnon, John D. (19 December 2018). "House Passes Bill to Create
National Quantum Computing Program". The Wall Street Journal.
^ University, Princeton (25 December 2019). "Quantum Computing
Breakthrough: Silicon Qubits Interact at Long-Distance". SciTechDaily.
^ Smolin 2001, pp. 53-57.Pages 220-226 are annotated references and
guide for further reading.
^ Burks, Goldstine & von Neumann 1947, pp. 1-464 reprinted in
Datamation, September-October 1962. Note that preliminary
discussion/design was the term later called system analysis/design, and
even later, called system architecture.
^ DBLP summarizes the Annals of the History of Computing year by
year, back to 1995, so far.
^ Top500.org (30 May 2022) ORNL's Frontier First to Break the Exaflop
Ceiling
^ McKay, Tom (22 June 2020). "Japan's New Fugaku Supercomputer Is
Number One, Ranking in at 415 Petaflops". Gizmodo.
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"online access". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Archived from
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Computers and Automation Magazine - Pictorial Report on the Computer
Field:
* A PICTORIAL INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTERS - 06/1957
* A PICTORIAL MANUAL ON COMPUTERS - 12/1957
* A PICTORIAL MANUAL ON COMPUTERS, Part 2 - 01/1958
* 1958-1967 Pictorial Report on the Computer Field - December issues
(195812.pdf, ..., 196712.pdf)
Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers, Stan Augarten, 1984.
OCR with permission of the author
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