The computer
evolution is indeed an interesting topic that has been explained in some different ways over
the years, by many authors. According to
The Computational ScienceEducation Project,
US, the computer has evolved through the following stages:
The
Mechanical Era (1623-1945)
Trying to use
machines to solve mathematical problems can be traced to the early 17th century. Wilhelm
Schickhard, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibnitz were among mathematicians who
designed and implemented calculators
that were capable of addition,subtraction,
multiplication, and division included.
The first
multi-purpose or programmable computing device was probably Charles
Babbage's Difference Engine, which was begun in 1823 but never completed. In
1842, Babbage designed a more ambitious machine, called the Analytical Engine
but unfortunately it also was only partially completed. Babbage, together with Ada Lovelace
recognized several important programming techniques, including conditional
branches, iterative loops and index
variables. Babbage designed the
machine which is arguably the first to be used in computational science. In
1933, George Scheutz and his son, Edvard
began work on a smaller version of the difference engine and by 1853 they had
constructed a machine that could process
15-digit numbers and calculate fourth-order differences.
The US Census Bureau
was one of the first organizations to use the mechanical
computers which used
punch-card equipment designed by Herman Hollerith to tabulate data for the 1890
census. In 1911 Hollerith's company merged with a competitor to found the
corporation which in
1924 became International Business Machines (IBM).
First
Generation Electronic Computers (1937-1953)
These devices used
electronic switches, in the form of vacuum tubes, instead of
electromechanical
relays. The earliest attempt to build an
electronic computer was by J. V.
Atanasoff, a
professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State in 1937. Atanasoff set out
to
build a machine that
would help his graduate students solve
systems of partial differential
equations. By 1941 he
and graduate student Clifford Berry had succeeded in building a machine that
could solve 29 simultaneous equations
with 29 unknowns. However, the
machine was not
programmable, and was more of an electronic calculator.
A second early
electronic machine was Colossus, designed by Alan Turing for the British
military in
1943. The first general purpose programmable electronic computer was the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), built by J. Presper
Eckert and John V. Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania. Research work
began in 1943, funded by the Army Ordinance Department, which needed a way to
compute ballistics during World War II. The machine was completed in 1945 and
it was used extensively for calculations during the design of the hydrogen
bomb. Eckert, Mauchly, and John von
Neumann, a consultant to the ENIAC project, began work on a new machine before
ENIAC was finished. The main contribution of EDVAC, their new project, was the
notion of a stored program. ENIAC was
controlled by a set of external switches and dials; to change the program
required physically altering the settings on these controls. EDVAC was able to
run orders of magnitude faster than ENIAC and by storing instructions in the same medium as data, designers could
concentrate on improving the internal structure of the machine without worrying
about matching it to the speed of an external control. Eckert and Mauchly later designed what was
arguably the first commercially successful
computer, the UNIVAC; in 1952.
Software technology during this period was very primitive.
Second
Generation (1954-1962)
The second generation
witnessed several important developments at all
levels of computer
system design,
ranging from the technology used to build the basic circuits to the
programming languages
used to write scientific applications.
Electronic switches in this era
were based on
discrete diode and transistor technology with a
switching time of
approximately 0.3
microseconds. The first machines to be built with this technology include
TRADIC at Bell
Laboratories in 1954 and TX-0 at MIT's Lincoln
Laboratory. Index
registers were
designed for controlling loops and floating point units for calculations based
on real numbers.
A number of high
level programming languages were introduced and these include
FORTRAN (1956), ALGOL
(1958), and COBOL (1959). Important commercial machines of
this era include the
IBM 704 and its successors, the 709 and 7094.
In the 1950s the first two
supercomputers were
designed specifically for numeric processing in scientific applications.
Third
Generation (1963-1972)
Technology changes in
this generation include the use of integrated circuits, or ICs
(semiconductor
devices with several transistors built into one physical component),
semiconductor memories,
microprogramming as a technique for
efficiently designing
complex processors
and the introduction of operating systems and time-sharing. The first ICs were based on small-scale
integration (SSI) circuits, which had around 10 devices per circuit (or
‘chip’), and evolved to the use of medium-scale integrated (MSI) circuits,
which had up to 100 devices per chip. Multilayered printed circuits were
developed and core memory was replaced by faster, solid state memories.
In 1964, Seymour Cray
developed the CDC 6600, which was the first architecture to use
functional
parallelism. By using 10 separate functional units that could operate
simultaneously and 32
independent memory banks, the CDC 6600
was able to attain a
computation rate of
one million floating point operations per second (Mflops). Five years
later CDC released
the 7600, also developed by Seymour
Cray. The CDC 7600, with its
pipelined functional
units, is considered to be the first vector processor and was capable of
executing at ten
Mflops. The IBM 360/91, released during the same period, was roughly
twice as fast as the
CDC 660.
Early in this third
generation, Cambridge University and the
University of London
cooperated in the
development of CPL (Combined Programming Language, 1963). CPL was,
according to its
authors, an attempt to capture only the important features of the complicated
and sophisticated ALGOL. However, like ALGOL, CPL was large with many features
that
were hard to learn.
In an attempt at further simplification,
Martin Richards of Cambridge
developed a subset of
CPL called BCPL (Basic Computer Programming Language, 1967). In
1970 Ken Thompson of
Bell Labs developed yet another simplification of CPL called simply
B, in connection with
an early implementation of the UNIX operating system. comment):
Fourth
Generation (1972-1984)
Large scale
integration (LSI - 1000 devices per chip) and very large scale integration
(VLSI -
100,000 devices per
chip) were used in the construction of the fourth generation computers.
Whole processors
could now fit onto a single chip, and for simple systems the entire
computer (processor,
main memory, and I/O controllers) could fit on one chip. Gate delays
dropped to about 1ns
per gate. Core memories were replaced by
semiconductor memories.
Large main memories
like CRAY 2 began to replace the older high speed vector processors,
such as the CRAY 1,
CRAY X-MP and CYBER
In 1972, Dennis
Ritchie developed the C language from the design of the CPL and
Thompson's B.
Thompson and Ritchie then used C to write a version of UNIX for the DEC
PDP-11. Other developments in software include very
high level languages such as FP
(functional
programming) and Prolog (programming in logic).
IBM worked with
Microsoft during the 1980s to start what we can really call PC (Personal
Computer) life
today. IBM PC was introduced in October
1981 and it worked with the
operating system
(software) called ‘Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS DOS) 1.0.
Development of MS DOS
began in October 1980 when IBM began searching the market for
an operating system
for the then proposed IBM PC and major contributors were Bill Gates,
Paul Allen and Tim
Paterson. In 1983, the Microsoft Windows
was announced and this has
witnessed several
improvements and revision over the last twenty years.
Fifth
Generation (1984-1990)
This generation
brought about the introduction of machines with hundreds of processors t
could all be working
on different parts of a single program.
The scale of integration
semiconductors
continued at a great pace and by 1990 it was possible to build chips wit
million components -
and semiconductor memories became standard on all comput
Computer networks and
single-user workstations also became popular.
Parallel processing
started in this generation. The Sequent
Balance 8000 connected up to
processors to a
single shared memory module though each processor had its own local cac
The machine was
designed to compete with the DEC VAX-780 as a general purpose U
system, with each
processor working on a different user's job. However Sequent provide
library of
subroutines that would allow programmers to write programs that would use m
than one processor,
and the machine was widely used to explore parallel algorithms a
programming
techniques. The Intel iPSC-1, also known
as ‘the hypercube’ connected e
processor to its own
memory and used a network interface to connect processors. T
distributed memory architecture
meant memory was no longer a problem and large syste
with more processors
(as many as 128) could be built. Also introduced was a machi
known as a
data-parallel or SIMD where there were several thousand very simple process
which work under the
direction of a single control unit. Both
wide area network (WAN) a
local area network
(LAN) technology developed rapidly.
Sixth
Generation (1990 - Now)
Most of the
developments in computer systems since 1990 have not been fundamen
changes but have been
gradual improvements over established
systems. This generat
brought about gains
in parallel computing in both the hardware and in improv
understanding of how
to develop algorithms to exploit parallel architectures. Workstation technology continued to improve,
with processor designs now using a combination of RISC, pipelining, and
parallel processing. Wide area
networks, network bandwidth and speed of operation and networking capabilities
have kept developing tremendously.
Personal computers (PCs) now operate with Gigabit per second processors,
multi-Gigabyte disks, hundreds of Mbytes of RAM, colour printers,
high-resolution graphic monitors, stereo sound cards and graphical user
interfaces. Thousands of software
(operating systems and application software) are existing today and Microsoft Inc. has been a major
contributor. Microsoft is said to be one of the biggest companies ever, and its
chairman – Bill Gates has been rated as the richest man for several years.
Finally, this
generation has brought about micro controller technology. Micro controllers are ’embedded’ inside some
other devices (often consumer products) so that they can control the features
or actions of the product. They work as
small computers inside devices and now
serve as essential components in most machines.
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