CONTENT OF THE CHAPTER

1. History of Computer
2. Generations of Computer

Chapter Two
History of Computer
Introduction
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 Science Education
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 multipurpose 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, Muchly, 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 Muchly 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 (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 timesharing.
The first ICs were based on small-scale integration (SSI) circuits, which had around 10 devices
per circuit (‘chip’), and evolved to the use of medium-scale integrated (MSI) circuits, which had
up to 100 devices per chip. Multi-layered 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 that
could all be working on different parts of a single program. The scale of integration in
semiconductors continued at a great pace and by 1990 it was possible to build chips with a
million components - and semiconductor memories became standard on all computers. Computer
networks and single-user workstations also became popular. Parallel processing started in this
generation. The Sequent Balance 8000 connected up to 20 processors to a single shared memory
module though each processor had its own local cache. The machine was designed to compete
with the DEC VAX-780 as a general purpose Unit system, with each processor working on a
different user’s job. However Sequent provided a library of subroutines that would allow
programmers to write programs that would use more than one processor, and the machine was
widely used to explore parallel algorithms and programming techniques. The Intel iPSC-1, also
known as ‘the hypercube’ connected each processor to its own memory and used a network
interface to connect processors. This distributed memory architecture meant memory was no
longer a problem and large systems with more processors (as many as 128) could be built. Also
introduced was a machine, known as a data-parallel or SIMD where there were several thousand
very simple processors which work under the direction of a single control unit. Both wide area
network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) technology developed rapidly.
Sixth Generation (1990 – to date)
Most of the developments in computer systems since 1990 have not been fundamental changes
but have been gradual improvements over established systems. This generation brought about
gains in parallel computing in both the hardware and in improved 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.
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.