HISTORY OF COMPUTERS

The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers)
were given this name because they performed the work that had previously been assigned to people.
"Computer" was originally a job title: it was used to describe those human beings (predominantly
women) whose job it was to perform the repetitive calculations required to compute such things as
navigational tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs. Imagine you had a
job where hour after hour, day after day, you were to do nothing but compute multiplications.
Boredom would quickly set in, leading to carelessness, leading to mistakes. And even on your best
days you wouldn't be producing answers very fast. Therefore, inventors have been searching for
hundreds of years for a way to mechanize (that is, find a mechanism that can perform) this task.

This picture shows what were known as "counting

tables"

A typical computer operation back when

computers were people.

The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids the memory
of the human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus operator can work on addition and
subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with a hand calculator (multiplication and
division are slower). The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving
abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. The abacus is still in use today, principally in the far
east. A modern abacus consists of rings that slide over rods, but the older one pictured below dates
from the time when pebbles were used for counting.

A very old abacus

A more modern abacus

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax
collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator but couldn't sell many because of
their exorbitant cost and because they really weren't that accurate. Up until the present age when car
dashboards went digital, the odometer portion of a car's speedometer used the very same mechanism
as the Pascaline to increment the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel. Pascal was a
child prodigy. At the age of 12, he was discovered doing his version of Euclid's thirty-second
proposition on the kitchen floor. Pascal went on to invent probability theory, the hydraulic press, and
the syringe. Shown below is an 8 digit version of the Pascaline, and two views of a 6 digit version:

Pascal's Pascaline

A 6 digit model for those who

couldn't afford the 8 digit model

A Pascaline opened up numerical

result.

In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave a
pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope.
Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the "hanging chad" from
the Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000).

Jacquard's Loom showing the

threads and the punched cards

By selecting particular cards for

Jacquard's loom you defined the
woven pattern.

A close-up of a Jacquard
card

Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes
in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still
see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to
display the results of the count.

An operator working at a
Hollerith Desk like the one
below

Preparation of punched cards for

the U.S. census

A few Hollerith desks still exist

today

IBM continued to develop mechanical calculators for sale to businesses to help with financial
accounting and inventory accounting. But the U.S. military desired a mechanical calculator more
optimized for scientific computation. By World War II the U.S. had battleships that could lob shells
weighing as much as a small car over distances up to 25 miles. During World War II the U.S. military
scoured the country looking for (generally female) math majors to hire for the job of computing these
tables. Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944.
This was the first programmable digital computer made in the U.S. The Mark I ran non-stop for 15
years, sounding like a roomful of ladies knitting. To appreciate the scale of this machine note the four
typewriters in the foreground of the following photo.

The Harvard Mark I: an electro-mechanical computer

The primary advantage of an integrated circuit is not that the transistors (switches) are miniscule
(that's the secondary advantage), but rather that millions of transistors can be created and
interconnected in a mass-production process. The IBM Stretch computer of 1959 needed its 33 foot
length to hold the 150,000 transistors it contained. These transistors were tremendously smaller than
the vacuum tubes they replaced, but they were still individual elements requiring individual assembly.
By the early 1980s this many transistors could be simultaneously fabricated on an integrated circuit.
Today's Pentium 4 microprocessor contains 42,000,000 transistors in this same thumbnail sized piece
of silicon.
It's humorous to remember that in between the Stretch machine (which would be called a mainframe
today) and the Apple I (a desktop computer) there was an entire industry segment referred to as minicomputers such as the following PDP-12 computer of 1969:

The DEC PDP-12

In 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could
solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns. This machine was the first to store data as a
charge on a capacitor, which is how today's computers store information in their main memory
(DRAM or dynamic RAM).

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer

Another candidate for granddaddy of the modern computer was Colossus, built during World War II
by Britain for the purpose of breaking the cryptographic codes used by Germany. Britain led the world
in designing and building electronic machines dedicated to code breaking, and was routinely able to
read coded Germany radio transmissions. But Colossus was definitely not a general purpose,
reprogrammable machine. Note the presence of pulleys in the two photos of Colossus below:

Two views of the code-breaking Colossus of Great Britain

The first substantial computer was the giant ENIAC machine by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper
Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator)
used a word of 10 decimal digits instead of binary ones like previous automated
calculators/computers.

Eniac Computer
Eckert and Mauchly first product was the famous UNIVAC computer, the first commercial computer.
In the 50's, UNIVAC was the household word for "computer" just as "Kleenex" is for "tissue". The
first UNIVAC was sold, appropriately enough, to the Census bureau. UNIVAC was also the first
computer to employ magnetic tape. Many people still confuse a picture of a reel-to-reel tape recorder
with a picture of a mainframe computer.

A reel-to-reel tape drive

ENIAC was unquestionably the origin of the U.S. commercial computer industry. By 1955 IBM was
selling more computers than UNIVAC and by the 1960's the group of eight companies selling
computers was known as "IBM and the seven dwarfs. In IBM's case it was their own decision to hire
an unknown but aggressive firm called Microsoft to provide the software for their personal computer
(PC). This lucrative contract allowed Microsoft to grow so dominant that by the year 2000 their
market capitalization (the total value of their stock) was twice that of IBM and they were convicted in
Federal Court of running an illegal monopoly.
If you learned computer programming in the 1970's, you dealt with what today are called mainframe
computers, such as the IBM 7090 (shown below), IBM 360, or IBM 370.

The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe

computer

The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe

computer

Paper tape has a long history as well. It was first used as an information storage medium by Sir
Charles Wheatstone, who used it to store Morse code that was arriving via the newly invented
telegraph. The alternative to time sharing was batch mode processing, where the computer gives its
full attention to your program. In exchange for getting the computer's full attention at run-time, you
had to agree to prepare your program off-line on a key punch machine which generated punch cards.
In 1990's a university student would typically own his own computer and have exclusive use of it in
his dorm room.

An IBM Key Punch machine

The original IBM Personal Computer

(PC)

The development of computers has followed difference steps in the technology used and
these steps of technological differences are called as generations.
FIRST GENERATION (1945-1960):
The first generation of computer were those computers which use Vacuum Tubes or Valves
technology. Almost all the early computer like ENIAC, EDVAC, EDSAC etc. were made a
reality only by the invention of vacuum tube, which is a fragile glass device that can control
and amplify electronic signals. In this computer they are using 18,000
vacuum tubes, 70,000 resisters, 10,000 capacitors and 60,000 switches. It took 150 kilo watt
electric power and it produce large amount of heat. They were bulky and required large
space. They had small primitive memories and no auxiliary storage.
SECOND GENERATION (1960-1965):
With the development of transistors and their use in circuits, magnetic core for memory
storage, the vacuum tubes of first generation are replaced by transistors to arrive at second
generation of computers. The size of transistors is much smaller when compared to vacuum
tubes. They consumed less power generated less heat and are faster and reliable. William B
Shickley, John Burdeen and Walter H Brattain are the scientists develop the transistors. They

are working bell telephone, U.S.A. They got noble prize. The major advantage use of
transistors was that the size of computer has come down as well as the power consumption.
Even the cost of transistors is less in comparison with the cost of vacuum tubes, the cost of
computer reduced drastically, they were more reliable then first generation computers.
Fortran, cobol, snowbal, algol etc. like high level languages are developed in this generation.
In this generation they are using magnetic tapes for storing.
THIRD GENERATION (1965-1975):
With the development of silicon chips. The third generation of computers came into
existence. These computers used compact integrated circuits (IC's) of silicon chips in place of
transistors. Each of these IC's consisted of large number of chips in very small packages.
With these IC's coming into picture the size of computers, cost, heat generation and power
consumption decreased to a great extent, speed and reliability increased as compared to
previous generations. These machines used IC's with LSI (Large Scale Integration).
FOURTH GENERATION (FROM 1975):
The computers belonging to these generation used Integrated Circuits with VLSI (Very Large
Scale Integration). These computers have high processing powers, low maintenance, high
reliability and very low power consumption. These computer reduces the cost as well as the
size of the computer.
FIFTH GENERATION:
These computers use optic fiber technology to handle Artificial Intelligence, expert systems,
robotics etc. These computers have very high processing speeds and are more reliable.