Chapter 2: Development of computers

2.1 History of Computers

We have all heard stories of primitive peoples counting their sheep by moving sticks or stones. A
base ten number system undoubtedly grew from the use of 10 fingers as counting objects.
Together with the development of people, the need to calculate and keep track of information
had become popular issue. So they soon developed a simple computing device and had a power
of storing small information. However, many thousands of years elapsed before developing
mechanical calculator.

Some of the calculating devices are mentioned bellow:

a) The Abacus
It is one of the earliest mechanical computational devices. It was in use in the Middle East as
early as 2500 BC. The familiar Chinese abacus ( dating approximately 1200 AD ) is composed
of a frame and a number of wires. The wires correspond to position of digits in decimal number-
units, tens, hundreds, and so on and the beads represent digits. Beads above the cross bar
represent 5 and those bellow 1.

Below (one each)

The abacus shows zero, if all the beads below the cross bar are at the lower frame and above are
at the upper frame.
Addition of two numbers on the abacus can be performed by representing the first number and
the second number without resetting the first. On any wire showing 10 or more, the two beads
above the cross bar are moved back, and an extra 1 (the Cary) is added to the wire on the left.
This process can be easily generalized to addition and subtraction of more than two numbers.

b) Pascal’s calculator
It is the first true mechanical calculator. In 1642, at the age of 19, the French philosopher and
mathematician Blaise Pascal developed a rotating wheel calculator, the predecessor of the latter

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popular desktop calculator. He built largely to assist his father, who was a tax collector in the
town of Rouen. Pascal’s calculator has one wheel corresponding to each power of 10; each wheel
has 10 position, one for each of the digits (0,..,9). Although Pascal’s calculator could only add
and subtract, it could be used indirectly for multiplication (by successive addition) and division
(by successive subtraction) as well.

c) The difference engine

It is the forerunner of the modern computer. Charles Babbage (1792-1871), a British
mathematician and engineer, is considered by many to be the real father of today’s computer,
was the developer of the difference engine and designer of the analytical engine. The difference
engine, also based on the rotating wheels principle, was operated by means of a single crank.
This devise has a power of calculation and print the output with out human intervention. He
finally designed significantly improved version of the difference engine (but not built) called
Analytic engine. It has different key components
- The store: A memory wheel consisting of set of counter wheels
- The mill: An arithmetic unit capable of performing the four basic arithmetic
operations. It operated on pairs of mechanical registers and produced a result stored in
another register, all of which were located in the store.
- Operation cards: These cards selected one of the four arithmetic operations by
activating the mill to perform the selected function.
- Variable cards: These cards selected the memory locations to be used by the mill for
a particular operation (a source of operand and the destination of the result).
- Output: was to print or a card punch device.
But finally the design halt largely due to the technology of the day is not far enough to supply the
required raw materials.

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d) Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine
Herman Hollerith was a statistician, in 1880 and developed his machine commissioned by the
U.S. Census Bureau to develop a technique for speeding up the processing of census data that
took at least 8 years before. He developed his machine that used the punched card to punch the
census data and tabulated by using his machine. This machine processed the 1890 American
census data within 3 years. It was really a great development. He finally established the
tabulating Machine Company, which later became the International Business Machine
Corporation (IBM).

e) Mark I:
Developed by Howard Aiken at Harvard University (1944), which was the first
electromechanical computer. Instructions were provided by means of punched paper tape, which
combined the functions of Babbage’s operation cards and variable cards. Each instruction had
the format
A1 A2 OP where
A1 and A2 are registers storing the operands
OP is the operation to be performed (e.g. +,-, x,)
Mark I. could do a single addition in 6 seconds and division in 12 seconds

f) ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer):

ENIAC is developed by Eckert and Mauchly in the University of Pennsylvania. This was the first
electronic calculator and first general purpose digital computer. This machine was enormous,
weighing 30 tones. Occupying 15,000 square feet of floor space and containing over 18,000
vacuum tubes. When operating, it consumed over 140 kWh of power. It had a capability of
performing 5,000 additions per second. Its memory consisted of 20 “accumulators” each capable
of holding a 10 digit decimal number. Each digit was represented by a ring of 10 vacuum tubes.
At any time, only one of the 10 tubes was in ON state, representing one of the 10 digits.

Fig: the vacuum tube

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  ENIAC did not use internally stored programs. Programs were wired on boards
similar to a telephone switch board.
 One of the major drawbacks of ENIAC was that it had to be programmed manually
by setting switches and plugging and unplugging cables.

g) The Von Neumann Machine

The task of entering and altering programs for the ENIAC was extremely tedious. Von Neumann
was the consultant on the ENIAC project and forward the stored program concept, i.e designing
the computer to get its instruction by reading them from memory alongside the data and a
program could be set or altered by setting the values of a portion of a memory. Based on this
concept, the first true electronic computers were developed by the name EDVAC (electronic
Discrete Variable Computer) and EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer).

h) Commercial Computers
The 1950s saw the birth of computers industry with two companies, Sperrry and IBM,
dominating the market place. In 1947, Eckert and Mauchly developed their successful
commercial computer called UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer).
UNIVAC was division of Remington Rand (later Sperry_Rand Corporation).
IBM, the major manufacturer of punched card processing equipment, also delivered its first
electronic stored program computer, the IBM 701, in 1953.

2.2 Generation of Computers

Computer generation is the technological development of a computer in terms of size, speed,
storage, cost, etc from its inception to the forthcoming future.
Although computer professionals do not agree on exact dates or specifics, computer
developments are often categorized by generations. Actually there are five generations and major
characteristics that distinguish them are the following;
 Dominant type of electronic circuit elements used.
 Major secondary storage media used.
 Computer language used.
 Types or characteristic of operating system used.
 Memory access time (a time to store or retrieve a word or data from memory).

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Computer generations are usually categorized by dramatic improvement in the hardware,
typically tenfold or better increases in speed and reliability.

First Generation Electronic computers (1942-1955)

 Vacuum tubes were used as the switching devices. The first general purposes 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.

Fig: the ENIAC

Through the use of a memory that was large enough to hold both instructions and data, and using
the program stored in memory to control the order of arithmetic operations, another first
generation computer, EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer), was able to run orders
of magnitude faster than ENIAC.

 The memory of these computers was constructed using electromagnetic relays and all data
and instructions were fed into the system from punched cards.

The instructions were written in machine language and assembly language, the latter only in
the 1950s.

Second Generation Electronic computers (1955-1964)

 Transistors (invented in 1947) were used as the switching devices. Transistors are much
smaller in size, more rugged, more reliable, and faster and consume less power than their
vacuum tube counter-parts. The second-generation computers were thus more powerful,
more reliable, less expensive, smaller, and cooler to operate than the first-generation
computers.

 The memory of the second-generation computers was composed of magnetic cores.

Magnetic cores were small rings made of ferrite, which could be magnetized, in either
clockwise or anti-clockwise direction.

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  High-level programming languages like FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL, and SNOBOL
were developed, which were easier to understand and work with than assembly and
machine languages.

Fig: the transistors

Third Generation Electronic computers (1964-1975)

 Around 1964 Integrated Circuits (ICs) made their appearance and the third-generation
computers were constructed around these ICs. ICs are circuits consisting of several
electronic components like transistors, resistors, and capacitors grown on a single chip of
silicon eliminating wired interconnection between components. ICs were much smaller,
less expensive to produce, more rugged and reliable, faster in operation, dissipated less
heat, and consumed much less power than circuits built by wiring electronic components.
The third-generation computers were thus more powerful, more reliable, less expensive,
smaller, and cooler to operate than the second-generation computers.

 Parallel advancements in storage technologies allowed the construction of larger magnetic

cores based memory, and larger capacity magnetic disks and magnetic tapes.

 Third-generation computers typically had a few megabytes (< 5 MB) of main memory and
magnetic disks capable of storing a few tens of megabytes of data per disk drive.

 Efforts were made to standardize some of the existing high-level programming languages
like FORTRAN IV and COBOL 68. Programs written with these languages were thus able
to run on any computer that has these compilers. Other high-level programming languages
like PL/1, PASCAL and BASIC were also introduced in this generation.

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 Fig: IC (integrated circuits)

Fourth generation (1971- present)

 The average number of electronic components packed on silicon doubled each year after
1965. The progress soon led to the era of large scale integration (LSI) with over 30000
electronic components integrated on a single chip, followed by very large-scale
integration (VLSI) when it was possible to integrate about one million electronic
components on a single chip. This progress led to a dramatic development – the creation of
a microprocessor. A microprocessor contains all the circuits needed to perform arithmetic
and logic operations as well as control functions, the core of all computers, on a single
chip. Hence it became possible to build a complete computer with a microprocessor, a few
additional primary storage chips, and other support circuitry. It started a new social
revolution – the Personal Computer (PC) revolution.
 Magnetic core memories were replaced by semiconductor memories, with very fast access
time.
 Hard disks also became cheaper, smaller in size, and larger in capacity and thus became
the standard in-built secondary storage device for all types of computer systems. Floppy
disks also became very popular as a portable medium for moving programs and data from
one computer system to another.
 The fourth-generation also saw the advent of supercomputers based on parallel vector
processing and symmetric multiprocessing technologies.
 Fourth-generation period also saw the spread of high-speed computer networking. LAN
and WAN became popular for connecting computers.
 Operating systems like MS-DOS and Windows made their appearance in this generation.
Several new PC-based application packages like word processors, spreadsheets and others
were developed during this generation. In the area of large-scale computers,
multiprocessing operating systems and concurrent programming languages were popular

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 technological developments. The UNIX operating system also became very popular for
use on large-scale systems. Some other software technologies that became popular during
the fourth-generation period are C programming language, object-oriented software
design, and object-oriented programming.

Fifth generation computer (Present & beyond (future))

 The fifth Generation was characterized by VLSI technology being replaced by ULSI
(Ultra Large Scale Integration) technology, with microprocessor chips having ten million
electronic components.
o In fact, the speed of microprocessor and size of main memory and hard disk
doubled almost every eighteen months. The result was that many of the features
found in the CPUs of large mainframe systems of the third and fourth generations
became part of the microprocessor architecture in the fifth generation. More
compact and more powerful computers are being introduced almost every year at
more or less the same price or even cheaper.
o High speed logic and memory chips are in existence. The size of main memory
and hard disk storage has increased several folds. Memory size of 256 MB to 4
GB and hard disk sizes of the order of 100 GB are common. RAID (Redundant
Array of Independent Disks) technology has made it possible to configure a bunch
of disks as a single hard disk with a total size of a few hundred gigabytes. Optical
disks (CD-ROMS, DVDs) also emerged as a popular portable mass storage
media.
o This generation also saw more powerful supercomputers based on parallel
processing technology.
o Communication technologies became faster day-by-day and more computers got
networked together, resulting in the Internet.
o In the area of operating systems, some of the concepts that gained popularity
during the fifth-generation include micro kernels (operating systems being
modeled and designed in a modular fashion), multithreading (a popular way to
improve application performance through parallelism), and distributed operating
systems (an operating system for a set of computers networked together with the

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 aim of making the multiple computers of the system appear as a single large
virtual system to its users).
 It is known by the introduction and advancement of Artificial Intelligence
o Development of applications, which are capable in
 Speech (voice)recognition
 Handwriting recognition, and so on
o Development of knowledge based platforms, such as
 Game playing: programming computer to play games
 Expert systems: programming computer to make decisions, comments,
and suggestions in real life situations
 Robotics: programming computers to perceive its environments through
its sensors, and react effectively to perform its task
 Natural language processing: programming computers to understand
natural human languages, and to respond using natural languages.
o Prolog (Programming in logic) and LISP (List Processing) were introduced for
logic programming

Summary of generation of computers

Generation 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th
Circuit element Vacuum tube Transistor IC LSI & VLSI UVLSI

SSD Punched card Magnetic Tape Magnetic disk Mass storage device Mass storage
devices
Language Machine & assembly Fortran, COBOL Structured Application & Object Logic
etc language oriented Programming
Operating system Operator control Batch system Application Time sharing Parallel
oriented Processing
Mem. Access time 1ms 10µs 10ns 1ns >1ns
Approx. date 1946-57 1958-64 1965-71 From 1971 above 1989-

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examples ENIAC, UNIVAC, IBM7090, 7094 IBM system Late IBM product Quantum
UDVAC computers,
nano
computers,
DNA
computers

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