A brief history of computing

• The book provides this.
• I think A quick review is in order.
• Early Devices
  • The book discusses Stonehenge briefly.
  • An Abacus Simulator.
  • Jacquard : a loom driven by punched cards. (page), early data storage, 1500's.
  • Many gear driven machines starting in the 1600's
    • Pascal 1642 (Wikipedia Page)
    • Leibniz 1694(page)
  • 1830's Babbage's Difference and analytical engine.
    • Many of the components we will find in chapters 4-5
      • Memory, ALU, Control Unit, branching loops.
      • Programmable.
      • Very much like modern machines.
    • It is Turing-complete: ie a real computer.
    • Not constructed in Babbage's time, cost and other factors
  • Babbage's ideas lead Ada Lovelace to become what we generally consider to be the first programmer.
  • Jacquard's punched card ideas were used by Herman Hollerith to tabulate the 1890 census
    • his company eventually become IBM.
  • From about 1930 to mid 1940's there were numerous electro-mechanical computers built.
    • Harvard Marc I
    • Conrad Zuse - several machines.
    • Coloossus
    • And many others.
    • These are sometimes considered generation 0.
  • ENIAC
    • University of Pennsylvania 1945
    • Generally considered the first general purpose digital computer.
    • About $6,000,000 today, $487,000 when constructed.
    • About 27 tons,
    • 8x3x100 ft. (1800 sq ft)
    • Used 150 kW of electricity.
      • Modern machines probably use 20-30 watts.
    • 5,000 additions per second.
    • 357 Multiplications per second.
    • 38 Divisions per second.
• Generation 1: Vacuum Tube (1951-1959)
  • Some pictures
  • A (most likely) glass tube, with most of the air removed, with electronics inside.
  • Think old style light bulb.
  • These produced heat and burned out.
  • Machines based on these were huge.
• Generation 2: Transistor (1959-1965)
  • Some Pictures
  • Implemented at Bell Labs.
  • This is essentially an electronic switch.
  • But not in glass or a vacuum.
  • Used far less power than a vacuum tube.
  • And could be packed much closer.
• Generation 3: Integrated Circuits (1965-1971)
  • Pictures
  • We learned how to put many transistors on a single chip of a semiconductor material.
  • This is far more power, heat and space efficient.
  • Introduction of Moore's Law
    • 1965
    • The number of transistors on a chip should double about every year.
    • This means the power of devices built from these chips should double.
    • An observation or prediction, not a physical constant.
    • This was a marketing/research goal law.
    • We stopped being able to crank up the clock a while ago.
    • But we are adding more cores. (More on this later)
    • Probably good until 2025, but ...
• Generation 4, VLSI (1971 - )
  • Very Large Scale Integration.
  • MANY MANY more transistors on a chip.
  • (By Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie - https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/11/Transistor-Count-over-time.png, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98219918)
  • We continue to learn how to pack more and more transistors on a single chip.
  • Continued decrease in size, power consumed and heat produced.
• A few more items
  • Using multiple "computers" or cores, or whatever together is called parallel computing.
  • This has existed for a long time.
  • But my phone has 8 cores.
• Networking and the cloud
  • Usable in the early 70's the first networks were unreliable and slow.
  • As we have advanced to the point where most of your university services are not local.