_ L MODULE 1 Basic Computing Concepts ‘Acomputer can be described as an electronic device that accepts data as input, process es the data based on a set of predefined instructions called program to produce the resul of these operations as output called information. From this description, a computer ca an Input P\ ~ stem, pi in the Fi INPUT PROCESS OUTPUT Figure 1.1: IPO Representation of a computer System Data are raw facts, such as a scorein examination or the name of a student, for example 55 or Malik respectively. There are three types of data ~ Numeric, alphabetic, and alpha numeric. Numeric data consists of digits 0 ~ 9 (such as 31), while alphabetic data consi st of any of the English language alphabets in upper and lower cases (e. g. Toyin). An al phanumeric data can consist of a number, an alphabet or a special character, such asa vehicle plate number (¢. g. AE 731 LRN). Information: data as described above contain no meaning, however, when itis transform ed into.a more meaningful and useful form, itis called information. The transformation process involves a series of operations to be performed by the computer on the raw data that are fed into the system. The operation can be arithmetic (such as addition, subtracti on, multiplication, and division), logical comparison or character manipulation (as in text processing) Logical comparison means testing whether one data item is greater than, equal to, or les sthan another item, and based on the outcome of the comparison, a specified action ca be taken. The output of the processing can be in form of reports which can be display ed or printed. The History of Computer In the early days of man, fingers and toes were used for counting. Later on, sticks and p ebbles were used. Permanent records of the result of counting were kept by putting mark son the ground, wall and so on using charcoal, chalk, and plant juice. The historical development of computing focuses on the digital computer from the Abac us to the modem electronic computer. Some of these people whose contributions have been widely acknowledged to the development of Computer will be discussed Abacus ‘The abacus was invented to replace the old methods of counting, Itis an instrument kn own to have been used for counting as far back as 500 B.C. in Europe, China, Japan and “d rT_ L India and itis still being used in some parts of China today. ‘The abacus qualifies as a digital instrument because it uses beads as counter to calcula te in disorete form. Itis made of a board that consists of beads that slide on wires. The abacus is divided by a wooden bar or rod into two zones. Perpendiculars to this rod are wires arranged in parallel, each one representing a positional value. Each zone is divided into two levels - upper and lower. Two beads are arranged on each wire in the upper zon e, while five beads are arranged on each wire in the lower zone. The abacus can be used to perform arithmetic operations such as addition and subtracti on efficiently. Figure 1.2: Modem abacus. Note that the abacus is really just a representation of the human fingers: the 5 lower ri ngs on each rod representthe 5 fingers and the 2 upper rings represent the 2 hands. Blaise Pascal Pascal was bom at Clermont, France in 1623 and died in Paris in 1662. Pascal was a Sci entist as well asa Philosopher. He started to build his mechanical machine in 1640 to ai dhis father in calculating taxes. He completed the first model of his machine in 1642 an dit was presented to the public in 1645, The machine, called Pascal machine or Pascaline, was a small box with eight dials that r esembled the analog telephone dials. Each dial is linked to rotating wheel that displayed the digits in a register window. Pascal's main innovative idea was the linkage provided f or the wheels such that an arrangement was made for a carry from one wheel to its left n eigbour when the wheel passed from a display of 9 to 0. Themachine could add and su btract directly. Figure 1.3; Pascal's Pascaline [photo © 2002 IEEE]_ LL ‘A Pascaline opened up so you can observe the gears and cylinders which rotated to d splay the numerical result Joseph Marie Jacquard In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could baseit weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from pu nched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since. Figure 1.5:By selecting particular cards for Jacquard's loom you defined the woven pat tern [photo © 2002 1 EEE] Charles Babbage Charles Babbage was born in Totnes, Devonshire on December 26, 1792 and died in Lon don on October 18, 1871. He was educated at Cambridge University where he studied M athematics. In 1828, he was appointed Lucasian Professor at Cambridge. Charles Babb age started work on his analytic engine when he was a student. His objective was to bui Id a program-controlled, mechanical, digital computer incorporating a complete arithmeti Cunit, store, punched card input and a printing mechanism ‘The program was to be provided by the set of Jacquard cards. However, Babbage was u hable to complete the implementation of his machine because the technology available at his time was not adequate to see him through. Moreover, he did not plan to use electri city in his design. It is noteworthy that Babbage’s design features are very close to thed esign of the modern computer. Babbage invented the modern postal system, cowcatcher “d rT_ L son trains, and the ophthalmoscope, which is still used today to treat the eye. Figure1.6: A small section of the type of mechanism employed in Babbage's Differe nee Engine [photo © 2002 IEEE] Augusta Ada Byron ‘Ada Byron was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron anda friend of Charles Bab bage, (Ada later become the Countess Lady Lovelace by martiage). Though she was onl y 19, she was fascinated by Babbage’s ideas and through letters and meetings with Bab bage she learned enough about the design of the Analytic Engine to begin fashioning pr ograms for the still unbuilt machine. While Babbage refused to publish his knowledge fo another 30 years, Ada wrote a series of "Notes’ wherein she detailed sequences of instr uctions she had prepared for the Analytic Engine. The Analy tic Engine remained unbuilt but Ada earned her spot in history as the first computer programmer. Ada invented the su routine and was the first to recognize the importance of looping Herman Hollerith Hollerith was born at Buffalo, New York in 1860 and died at Washington in 1929. Holleri th founded a company which merged with two other companies to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Company which in 1924 changed its name to Intemational Busine ss Machine (|BM) Corporation, a leading company in the manufacturing and sales of co mputer today Hollerith, while working at the Census Department in the United States of America beca me convinced that a machine based on cards can assist in the purely mechanical work o f tabulating population and similar statistics was feasible. He left the Census in 1882 to start work on the Punch Card Machine which is also called Hollerith desks This machine system consisted of a punch, a tabulator with a large number of clock-ike counters and a simple electrically activated sorting box for classifying data in aecordanc ewith values punched on the card. The principle he used was simply to represent logical and numerical data in the form of holes on cards His system was installed in 1889 in the United States Army to handle Army Medical stati stics. He was asked to install his machine to process the 1890 Census in USA. This hed id and in two years, the processing of the census data was completed which used to tak “d rT| eten years. Hollerith’s machine was used in other countries such as Austria, Canada, ital y, Norway and Russia. fae 4 Figure 1.7: Hollerith desks [photo courtesy The Computer Museum John Von Neumann Von Neumann was born on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Hungary and died in Washi ngton D. C. on February 8, 1957. He was a great mathematician with significant contribu tion to the theory of games and strategy, set theary and the design of high speed comput ing machines. In 1933, he was appointed one of the first six professors of the sch ool of mathematics in the institute for Advanced Study at the Princeton University, USA, a positi on he retained until his death. Neumann with some other people presented a paper titled "The Preliminary discussion o f the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument” popularly known as Von Ne umann machine. This paper contains revolutionary ideas on which the present-day com puters are based. The machine has Storage, Control, Arithmetic and input/output units. The machine was to bea general-purpose computing machine. It was to be an electroni c machine and introduced the concept of stored program. This concept implied that the operations in the computer were to be controlled by a program stored in the memory of t he computer. This program was to consist of codes that intermixed data with instruction s. Asa result of this, it became possible for computations to proceed at electronic speed, p erform the same set of operations or instructions repeatedly and the concept of program counter, which implied that whenever an instruction is fetched, the program counter whic his a high-speed register automatically contains the address of the instruction to be exe cuted next. J. V. Atanasoff One of the earliest attempts to build an all-electronic digital computer occurred in 1937 b y J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at lowa State University. By 1 941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine tha “d rT| could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns. This machine was the fea o store data as a charge on a capacitor, which is how today computers stored informatio nis in their main memory. it was also the first to employ binary arithmetic. However, the machine was not programmable, it lacked a conditional branch, its design was appropria te for only one type of mathematical problem, and it was not further pursued af ter World War ll. Figure 1.8: The Atanasoff-Berry Computer [photo © 2002 IEEE] Howard Aiken Howard Aiken of Harvard was the principal designer of the Mark |. The Harvard Mark I co mputerwas built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944. This was the first p rogrammable digital computer made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic comput et. Instead the Mark | was constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutch es. The machine weighed 5 tons, incorporated 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51 f eet long, and had a 50ft rotating shaft running its length, tumed by a § horsepower electr ic motor. The Mark | ran non-stop for 15 years Figure 1.9: The Harvard Mark I: An electro-mechanical computerFigure 1.10: One of the four paper tape readers on the Harvard Mark | Grace Hopper Grace Hopper was one of the primary programmers for the Mark |. Hopper found the firs t computer bug’: a dead moth that had gotten into the Mark | and whose wings were blo cking the reading of the holes in the paper tape. The word "bug" had been used to descri bea defect since at least 1889 but Hopper is credited with coining the word “debugging” to describe the work to eliminate program faults. | ae ie er gti “engi SOBs Ea plied Gate te, Panel F eee Figure 1.11: The first computer bug [photo © 2002 IEEE] In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, 'Flow-matic’. This language eventually became COBOL which was the language most affected by the infamous ¥2K problem. A high-level language is designed to be more understandable by humans than i sthe binary language understood by the computing machinery. A high-level language is. worthless without a program ~ known as a compiler - to translate it into the binary langu age of the computer and hence Grace Hopper also constructed the world's first compiler Grace remained active as a Rear Admiral in the Navy Reserves until she was 79. Bill Gates -William (Bill) H. Gates was bom on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, USA Bill ot tes decided to drop out of college so he could concentrate all his time writing programs f of Intel 8080 categories of Personal Computers (PC). This early experience put Bill Gates in the ight place at the right time once IBM decided to standardize on the Intel mictoptoc. essors for their line of PCs in 1981. Gates founded a company called Microsoft Corporati on (together with Paul G. Allen) and released its first operating system called MS-DOS 1 Qin August, 1981 and the last of its group in (MS-DOS 6.22) April, 1994. Bill Gates anno unced Microsoft Windows on November 10, 1983 Philip Emeagwali Philip Emeagwali was born in 1954, in the Eastern part of Nigeria. He had to leave scho ol because his parents couldn't pay the fees and he lived in a refugee camp during the ci vilwar. He won a scholarship to university. He later migrated to the United States of Ame rica. In 1989, he invented the formula that used 65,000 separate computer processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second. Philip Emeagwali, a supercomputer and Internet pioneer is regarded as one of the fathers of the internet because he invented an international network which is similar to, but pred ates that of the Internet. He also discovered mathematical equations that enable the petr oleum industry to recover more oil. Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, computa tion's Nobel Prize, for inventing a formula that lets computers perform the fastest compu tations, a work that led to the reinvention of supercomputers.