CS101 Introduction to Computing

Lecture 2
Evolution of Computing
 During the Last Lecture …

 We learnt about the Analytical Engine - the first

general-purpose, digital computer – and its inventor
Charles Babbage

 We had a discussion about the key strengths (speed,

do not get bored) and weaknesses (pattern
recognition, innovative ideas) of the modern
computer
 Today’s Goal

To learn about the evolution of computing

To recount the important milestones and the key events

To learn about the steps that took us from Babbage’s idea of the Analytical Engine to
today’s ultra-smart hand held computers
But first, why should we spend time on
recounting the events of the past

Why not just talk about what is happening

in computing now and what is going to
happen in the future?

Why?
 If you do not learn from the history, your condemned to repeat
it

 Recounting the events of the past provides an excellent

opportunity to:
 learn lessons
 discover patterns of evolution, and
 use them in the future

 If we learn from history well, we will:

 neither repeat the mistakes of the past
 nor would we waste time re-inventing what already has been
invented
Babbage’s Analytical Engine - 1833

 Mechanical, digital, general-purpose

 Was crank-driven

 Could store instructions

 Could perform mathematical calculations

 Could store information permanently in punched cards

 Punched Cards - 1801

 Initially had no relationship with computers

 Invented by a Frenchman named Joseph-Marie Jacquard

for storing weaving patterns for automated textile looms
(“khuddian”)

 Their value for storing computer-related information was

later realized by the early computer builders

 Punched cards were replaced my magnetic storage only

in the early 1950s
Protests Against Jacquard’s Invention

 Hand weavers saw the automatic loom as a threat to their livelihood

 They burned several of the new machines

 A few weavers even physically assaulted Jacquard

 Turing Machine - 1936

 Alan Turing of Cambridge University presented his idea of

a theoretically simplified but fully capable computer,
now known as the “Turing Machine”

 The concept of this machine, which could theoretically

perform any mathematical computation, was very
important in the future development of the computer

 You will learn about the details of the “Turing Machine”

in your advanced Computer Science courses
Another contribution by Alan Turing

 The “Turing test”

 A test proposed to determine if a computer has the ability to think

 So far no one has built a computer that can pass that test – there is cash prize of
US$100,000
 Terminal

Human

Terminal

Interrogator

Machine
on its own
 Turing Test

 An interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal,

therefore can't see her counterparts

 The interrogator’s task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine,
and which is the human only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool"
the interrogator, it passes the “Turing Test”.
 Vacuum Tube - 1904

 John Fleming, an English Physicist, developed the very

first one

 These electronic devices consist of 2 or more electrodes

encased in a glass or metal tube

 They along with electric relays were used in the

construction of earlier computers

 These tubes have now been almost completely replaced

by more reliable and less costly transistors
ABC - 1939

 Attanasoff-Berry Computer

 John Attanasoff & Clifford Berry at Iowa State College

 World’s first electronic computer

 The first computer that used binary numbers instead of

decimal

 Helped grad students in solving simultaneous linear equations

Harvard Mark 1 - 1943

 Howard Aiken of Harvard University

 The first program controlled machine

 Included all the ideas proposed by Babbage for the

Analytical Engine

 The last famous electromechanical computer

ENIAC – 1946

 Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer

 World’s first large-scale, general-purpose electronic computer
 Built by John Mauchly & John Echert at the University of Pennsylvania
 Developed for military applications
 5,000 operations/sec, 19000 tubes, 30 ton
 9’ x 80’
 150 kilowatts: Used to dim the lights in the City of Philadelphia down when it ran
Transistor - 1947

 Invented by Shockly, Bardeen, and Brattain

at the Bell Labs in the US

 Compared to vacuum tubes, it offered:

 much smaller size
 better reliability
 much lower power consumption
 much lower cost

 All modern computers are made of

miniaturized transistors
 Tubes replaced mechanicals

 Transistors replaced tubes

 What is going to replace the transistors?

EDVAC – 1948

 Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer

 Built by Echert & Mauchly and included many design

ideas proposed by Von Neumann

 The first electronic computer design to incorporate a

program stored entirely within its memory

 First computer to use Magnetic Tape for storing

programs. Before this, computers needed to be re-
wired each time a new program was to be run
 Floppy Disk - 1950

Invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Yoshiro Nakamats

Provided faster access to programs and data as compared with magnetic tape
 Compiler - 1951

 Grace Hopper of US Navy develops the very first high-level language compiler

 Before the invention of this compiler, developing a computer program was tedious
and prone to errors

 A compiler translates a high-level language (that is easy to understand for humans)

into a language that the computer can understand
 UNIVAC 1 - 1951

 UNIVersal Automatic Computer

 Echert & Mauchly Computer Company
 First computer designed for commercial apps
 First computer that could not only manipulate numbers but text data as well
 Max speed: 1905 operations/sec
 Cost: US$1,000,000
 5000 tubes. 943 cu ft. 8 tons. 100 kilowatts
 Between 1951-57, 48 were sold
 BASIC - 1965

 Beginner All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

 Developed by Thomas Kurtz & John Kemeny at

Dartmouth College

 The first programming language designed for the non-

techies

 The grand-mother of the most popular programming

language in the world today – Visual BASIC
 Computer Mouse - 1965

 Invented by Douglas Englebart

 Did not become popular until 1983, when Apple Computers adopted the
concept
 ARPANET - 1969

 A network of networks

 The grand-daddy of the today’s global Internet

 A network of around 60,000 computers developed by the US Dept of Defense to

facilitate communications between research organizations and universities
Intel 4004 - 1971

 The first microprocessor

 Microprocessor: A complete computer on a chip

 Speed: 750 kHz

Altair 8800 - 1975

 The commercially available 1st PC

 Based on the Intel 8080

 Cost $397

 Had 256 bytes of memory; my PC at

home has a million times more RAM
(Random Access Memory)
 Cray 1 - 1976

 The first commercial supercomputer

 Supercomputers are state-of-the-art machines

designed to perform calculations as fast as the
current technology allows

 Used to solve extremely complex tasks: weather

prediction, simulation of atomic explosions; aircraft
design; movie animation

 Cray 1 could do 167 million calculations a send; the

current state-of the-art machines can do many
trillion (1012) calculations per second
IBM PC & MS DOS - 1981

 IBM PC: The tremendously popular PC; the grand-daddy

of 95% of the PC’s in use today

 MS DOS: The tremendously popular operating system

that came bundled with the IBM PC
TCP/IP Protocol - 1982

 Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol

 The communications protocol used by the

computer networks, including the Internet

 A communication protocol is a set of rules that

governs the flow of information over a network
Apple Macintosh - 1984

 The first popular, user-friendly, WIMP-based PC

 Based on the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing

Device) ideas first developed for the Star computer at
Xerox PARC (1981)
 World Wide Web -1989

 Tim Berners Lee – British physicist

 1989 – At the European Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN) in Geneva

 1993 - The 1st major browser “Mosaic” was developed at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Deep Blue -vs- Kasparov - 1997

It could analyze up to 300 billion

chess moves in three minutes

In 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputer

designed by IBM, beat Gary Kasparov, the
World Chess Champion

That computer was exceptionally fast, did

not get tired or bored. It just kept on
analyzing the situation and kept on
searching until it found the perfect move
from its list of possible moves
Mobile Phone-Computer

 A small computer, no bigger than the hand set of desktop phone

 Can do whatever an Internet-capable computer can plus can function as a regular

phone

 First consumer device formed by the fusion of computing and wireless

telecommunication
What is he next major Milestone?

1. Mechanical computing

2. Electro-mechanical computing

3. Vacuum tube computing

4. Transistor computing
(the current state-of the-art)

5. Quantum computing
Quantum
Mechanics
QUANTUM MECHANICS is the branch of
physics which describes the activity of
subatomic particles, i.e. the particles that
make up atoms
 What is he next major Milestone?

 Quantum computers may one day be millions of times more

efficient than the current state-of-the-art computers.
 They take advantage of the laws that govern the behavior of
subatomic particles.
 These laws allow quantum computers to examine all possible
answers to a question simultaneously
 For example, if you want to find the largest from a list of four
numbers:
 The current computers require on average 2 to 3 steps to get to the
answer
 Whereas, the quantum computer may be able to do that in a single
step
 For further info …

Read the following article that is available on the Web:

Quantum Computing with Molecules

by Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang

http://www.mat.ucm.es/catedramdeguzman/drupal/si
tes/default/files/mguzman/01historias/haciaelfuturo
/Burgos090900/quantumcomputingSciAmer/0698gers
henfeld.html
What have we learnt today?
Focus of the Next Lecture

The World Wide Web