A History of Computer Hardware

• Early Computation Hardware
  • Fingers
  • Stonehenge?
  • Abacus, sand tables, ...
    • Positions of beads/stones store data
    • Changing positions yields computations
  • Pascal
    • Pascaline (1642)
    • gear driven machine to add/subtract whole numbers
    • This design carried into the 20^th century
    • Could not be programmed, and had to be operated like an abacus
  • Leibniz
    • the same but all four operations on integers
    • Could not be programmed, and had to be operated like an abacus
  • Jacquard's Loom
    • 1801
    • weave a pattern in cloth designated on cards
    • The cards held the pattern or "program"
    • Holes were punched in the cards to store the program
    • We will see that this is an important idea
  • Babbage
    • 1822 Difference Engine
    • Finds the solution to polynomial equations
    • 1833 Analytical Engine (Design Only)
    • Wasn't / Couldn't be built
    • Many features of modern computer
      • Memory
      • ALU - Arithmetic Logic Unit
      • I/O devices
      • Could be programmed
    • This was built much later (20/21 century)
    • Each computation took hundreds/thousands of turns of a crank
    • Speed was definitely limited.
    • Used punched cards for input
  • Hollerith
    • Tabulating machine to do the 1890 census
    • Formed a company that became IBM
    • Used punched cards to store data.
  • Turing
    • 1939, Turing Machine
    • Abstract machine, not hardware
    • Basis for modeling computing today
• Generation Zero
  • Zuse
    • 1930's
    • An electronic descendant of Babbage's Machine
    • Used electronic relays in place of gears
    • Nazis would not buy the design, and his house was bombed destroying his prototypes
  • Atanasoff
    • Completely electronic calculator.
    • Could only solve systems of linear equations.
• Generation 1, Vacuum Tube Computers
  • Mauchly and Eckert
    • Mauchly wanted to predict weather
    • This required many computations
    • Done on early "computers"
      • A job title, not a device
      • A person who used an adding machine to perform computations
      • ACM
    • Built ENIAC
      • 17,469 Vacuum tubes
      • 1,800 square feet of space
      • 30 tons
      • Memory of 1000 bits
      • Used base 10
      • Built by army to compute ballistics charts.
    • Vacuum tubes
      • A Descendant of the lightbulb
      • Can be used to store a charge
      • Just like a lighbulb
        • They generate heat (a lot of heat)
        • They use a lot of power
        • They burn out
        • They take space
        • They are also very slow
        • Not quite but people said the machines wouldn't work because tubes would burn out faster than they could be replaced
• Generation 2, Transistors
  • Transistor
    • Transfer Resistor
    • A solid state version of a Vacuum Tube
    • base, emitter, collector
    • If a charge is applied to the base, electrons flow from the emitter to the collector.
    • A simple switch
    • Much
      • Smaller,
      • More Reliable
      • Lower power consumption
    • Than a vacuum tube.
  • This smaller faster computers
  • 1950's
  • 10 million instructions per second
  • 128K words of memory
  • Also, no moving parts -> much faster.
• The third generation, Integrated Circuits
  • "The Chip"
  • Print transistors on a board
  • 1965- present
  • Dozens of transistors on a chip
  • (Today MUCH higher)
  • Faster, Smaller Cheaper
  • Compatable systems
• The fourth Generation (LSI, VLSI)
  • SI - scale Integration
  • The number of transistors on a chip
  • SSI - Small Scale Integration - the first generation 10's of transistors
  • MSI
  • LSI - Large Scale Integration - several thousand transistors
  • VLSI - Very Large Scale Integration - more than 10,000 transistors
  • With this, you can put the entire CPU on a chip
  • In 1987, students at upenn built ENIAC on a chip, ~174,000 transistors
  • Many small processors followed
• Moore's Law
  • Observed in 1965 by Gorden Moore
  • The number of transistors on a chip will double every year
  • Closer to two years then
  • Closer to 18 months now
  • Not a law but an observation
  • Intel thinks they can pull this off for the next 10 years
  • Essentially says speed will double every 18 months
• Parallel Computers
  • SIMD - normal computers
  • MIMD -
  • SIMD