INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTERS

It is an electronic device that

operates under the control of a set
of instructions that is stored in its
memory unit.
INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTERS

INFORMATION SYSTEM CYCLE

1.Input
2.Process
3.Output
4.Feedback
COMPONENTS OF A COMPUTER
 HARDWARE - consists of the computer itself, and any
equipment connected to it.
 SOFTWARE - is the set of instructions that the
computer follows in performing a task.
 PEOPLEWARE - user
HISTORY OF COMPUTERS

"Computer" was originally used to computer

any figures.
First Calculating Device

ABACUS
Its only value is that it aids the memory of the
human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus
operator can work on addition and subtraction
problems at the speed of a person equipped with a
hand calculator. The oldest surviving abacus was
used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. A modern
abacus consists of rings that slide over rods, but the
older dates from the time when pebbles were used
for counting (the word "calculus" comes from the
Latin word for pebble).
 A very old abacus

A more modern abacus.

Note how the abacus is
really just a representation
of the human fingers: the 5
lower rings on each rod
represent the 5 fingers and
the 2 upper rings represent
the 2 hands.
1617
John Napier

Napier invented logarithms,

which are a technology that
allows multiplication to be
performed via addition. The
magic ingredient is the
logarithm of each operand,
which was originally
obtained from a printed
table. But Napier also
invented an alternative to
tables, where the logarithm
values were carved on ivory
sticks which are now called
Napier's Bones.
An original set of Napier's Bones
A more modern set of Napier's Bones
1632
Slide Rule
Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632
and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini,
and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.
 The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the
calculating clock, so named by its inventor, the German professor Wilhelm
Schickard in 1623. This device got little publicity because Schickard died soon
afterward in the bubonic plague.
1642
Blaise Pascal
Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50
of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) Up until the
present age when car dashboards went digital, the odometer portion of a car's
speedometer used the very same mechanism as the Pascaline to increment
the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel.

8-digit Pascaline Model

A 6-digit model
 German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz managed to build a four-
function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division)
calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because,
instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes
arranged around their circumference in a stair-step fashion.
1801
Joseph Marie Jacquard
Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the
design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden
cards, held together in a long row by rope.

Jacquard's Loom showing the threads and the punched cards

By selecting particular cards
for Jacquard's loom you
defined the woven pattern
A close-up of a Jacquard card
1822
Charles Babbage
Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating
machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference
Engine. This machine would be able to compute tables of
numbers, such as logarithm tables. He obtained
government funding for this project due to the importance of
numeric tables in ocean navigation.

By promoting their commercial and military navies,

the British government had managed to become the earth's
greatest empire. But in that time frame the British
government was publishing a seven volume set of
navigation tables which came with a companion volume of
corrections which showed that the set had over 1000
numerical errors.
A small section of the type of
mechanism employed in Babbage's
Difference Engine
 In his next brainstorm, which he called the Analytic
Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6
steam engines, would be more general purpose in nature
because it would be programmable, thanks to the punched
card technology of Jacquard.

But it was Babbage who made an important

intellectual leap regarding the punched cards. In the
Jacquard loom, the presence or absence of each hole in the
card physically allows a colored thread to pass or stops that
thread. Babbage saw that the pattern of holes could be
used to represent an abstract idea such as a problem
statement or the raw data required for that problem's
solution. Babbage saw that there was no requirement that
the problem matter itself physically pass thru the holes.
 Furthermore, Babbage realized that punched paper
could be employed as a storage mechanism, holding
computed numbers for future reference. Because of the
connection to the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two
main parts of his Analytic Engine the "Store" and the "Mill",
as both terms are used in the weaving industry. The Store
was where numbers were held and the Mill was where they
were "woven" into new results. In a modern computer these
same parts are called the memory unit and the central
processing unit (CPU).
 The Analytic Engine also had a key function
that distinguishes computers from calculators: the
conditional statement.

Conditional statement allows a program to

achieve different results each time it is run. Based on
the conditional statement, the path of the program
can be determined based upon a condition or
situation that is detected at the very moment the
program is running.

The conditional statement also allows a program

to react to the results of its own calculations.
 Ada Byron/Countess Lady Lovelace, the
daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron.

She was fascinated by Babbage's ideas and thru

letters and meetings with Babbage she learned
enough about the design of the Analytic Engine to
begin fashioning programs for the still unbuilt
machine.

Ada earned her spot in history as the first computer

programmer. Ada invented the subroutine and was
the first to recognize the importance of looping.
1790
Herman Hollerith
The U.S. Constitution states that a census should be
taken of all U.S. citizens every 10 years in order to determine
the representation of the states in Congress. The census
bureau offered a prize for an inventor to help with the 1890
census and this prize was won by Herman Hollerith, who
proposed and then successfully adopted Jacquard's punched
cards for the purpose of computation.

Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk,

consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the
cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using
Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers),
and a large wall of dial indicators to display the results of
the count.
An operator working at a Hollerith Desk
Preparation of punched cards for the
U.S. census
Hollerith desks
Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company
which, after a few buyouts, eventually became International
Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew rapidly
and punched cards became ubiquitous. Your gas bill would
arrive each month with a punch card you had to return with
your payment. This punch card recorded the particulars of your
account

Two types of computer punch cards

1944
Mark I
Harvard Mark I computer was
built as a partnership between
Harvard and IBM. This was the first
programmable digital computer
made in the U.S. But it was not a
purely electronic computer. Instead
the Mark I was constructed out of
switches, relays, rotating shafts,
and clutches. The machine
weighed 5 tons, incorporated 500
miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51
feet long, and had a 50 ft rotating
shaft running its length, turned by a
5 horsepower electric motor. The
Mark I ran non-stop for 15 years,
sounding like a roomful of ladies The Harvard Mark I: an electro-
knitting. mechanical computer
Close-up of one of the Mark I's four paper tape readers. A paper tape
was an improvement over a box of punched cards
 One of the primary
programmers for the Mark I
was a woman, Grace
Hopper. Hopper found the
first computer "bug": a
dead moth that had gotten
into the Mark I and whose
wings were blocking the
reading of the holes in the
paper tape. The word "bug"
had been used to describe
a defect since at least 1889
but Hopper is credited with The first computer bug
coining the word
"debugging" to describe the
work to eliminate program
faults.
The Apple 1 which was sold as a do-it-yourself kit
Typical wiring in an early mainframe
computer
An integrated circuit
ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator

ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania

between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John
Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who
got funding from the war department after promising
they could build a machine that would replace all the
"computers", meaning the women who were employed
calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns.
The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small
piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to
their lab to show off their progress were some of these
female computers.
Two views of ENIAC: the "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator"
 Eckert and Mauchly's next teamed up with the mathematician John von
Neumann to design EDVAC, which pioneered the stored program. Because he was
the first to publish a description of this new computer, von Neumann is often
wrongly credited with the realization that the program (that is, the sequence of
computation steps) could be represented electronically just as the data was. But
this major breakthrough can be found in Eckert's notes long before he ever started
working with von Neumann. Eckert was no slouch: while in high school Eckert had
scored the second highest math SAT score in the entire country.
By the end of the 1950's computers were no
longer one-of-a-kind hand built devices owned
only by universities and government research
labs.

Eckert and Mauchly left the University of

Pennsylvania over a dispute about who owned
the patents for their invention. They decided to
set up their own company. Their first product
was the famous UNIVAC computer, the first
commercial (that is, mass produced) computer.
In the 50's, UNIVAC (a contraction of "Universal
Automatic Computer") was the household word
for "computer".

The first UNIVAC was sold, appropriately

enough, to the Census bureau. UNIVAC was
also the first computer to employ magnetic tape.
The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe computer
An Example of Punch card
IBM desktop computer
CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPUTER:
 Accuracy

 Repeatability

 Speed

 Reliability

 Storage Capacity

 Programmability

 Productivity
CAPABILITIES OF COMPUTER:

1. Can solve complex calculations quickly

which takes a long time to solve manually

2. Capable of handling and processing large

calculations at a single time

3. All Electronic Items have some form of

Computing functions.
LIMITATIONS OF COMPUTER

1. Cannot replace a Human Brain

2. Works only on stored procedures and cannot

think on its own.

3. Not all complex calculations can be solved

through computers

4. Cannot depend on computers all the time

CLASSIFICATION OF COMPUTERS
ACCORDING TO SIZE

SUPERCOMPUTERS

 Largest computers.

 Most powerful, the most expensive, and the fastest.

 They are capable of processing trillions of instructions

per second.
MAINFRAMES
 Large computers

 Processes data at very high rates of speed,

measured in the millions of instructions per second

 Very expensive

 Mainframes are designed for multiple users and

process vast amounts of data quickly. Banks, insurance
companies, manufacturers, mail-order companies, and
airlines are typical users. Mainframes are often
‘servers’-- computers that control the networks of
computers for large companies
MICROCOMPUTERS

 Divided into 2 groups -- personal computers and

workstations.

 Workstations are specialized computers that

approach the speed of mainframes. Often
microcomputers are connected to networks of other
computers.

 Personal Computers is any general-purpose

computer whose size, capabilities, and original
sales price make it useful for individuals, and which
is intended to be operated directly by an end user,
with no intervening computer operator.
NOTEBOOK

 Can fit into a briefcase and weigh fewer

than two pounds

 A larger, heavier version is called a laptop

computer

 Notebooks generally cost more than

microcomputers but can run most of the
microcomputer software and are more
versatile.
PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANT(PDA)

 The smallest handheld computer

 PDAs are used to track appointments and

shipments as well as names and addresses.

 PDAs are called pen-based computers

because they utilize a pen-like stylus that
accepts hand-written input directly on a touch-
sensitive screen.
ACCORDING TO PURPOSE
GENERAL-PURPOSE
 designed to perform, or that is capable of
performing, in a reasonably efficient manner, the
functions required by both scientific and business
applications.
SPECIAL-PURPOSE
 A computer designed from scratch to perform
a specific function