Application of

Information &
Computing
Technologies
Lecture 2

Rana Taimur Khan

Lecturer GCUF
 During the Last Lecture …
• We learnt about the Analytical Engine - the
first general-purpose, digital computer – and
its inventor Charles Babbage

• We had a discussion about the key strengths

(speed, storage, do not get bored) and
weaknesses (pattern recognition, innovative
ideas) of the modern computer
 Today’s Goal
1. To learn about the evolution of computing

2. To recount the important and key events

3. To learn about some of the milestones on

the journey that has taken us from
Babbage’s idea of the Analytical Engine to
today’s ultra-smart hand held computers
But first, why should we spend time on
recounting the events of the past?

Why not just talk about what is happening in

computing now and what is going to happen in
the future?

Why not?
• If you do not learn from the history, you are
condemned to repeat it

• Recounting the events of the past provides an

excellent opportunity to:
– learn lessons
– discover patterns of positive evolution, and
– use them in the future

• If we learn from history well, we will:

– neither repeat the mistakes of the past
– nor would we waste time re-inventing what already has been
invented
 Having established the
important of history …
• Let’s start recounting some of the
important milestones in the evolution of
computing
Babbage’s Analytical Engine - 1833
• Mechanical, digital, general-purpose

• Was crank-driven

• Could store instructions

• Could perform mathematical calculations

• Had the ability to print

• Could punched cards as permanent memory

 Punched Cards - 1801
• Initially, had no relationship with computers

• Invented by a Frenchman named Joseph-Marie

Jacquard for storing weaving patterns for
automated textile looms (“khuddian”)

• Their value for storing computer-related

information was later realized by the early
computer builders

• Punched cards were replaced by magnetic

storage only in the early 1950s
Protests Against Jacquard’s Invention

• Hand weavers saw the automatic loom as a

threat to their livelihood

• They burned several of the new machines

• A few weavers even physically assaulted

Jacquard
 Turing Machine - 1936
• Alan Turing of Cambridge University presented his
idea of a theoretically simplified but fully capable
computer, now known as the “Turing Machine”

• The concept of this machine, which could theoretically

perform any mathematical computation, was very
important in the future development of the computer

• You will learn about the details of the “Turing Machine”

in your advanced Computer Science courses
Another interesting contribution by
Alan Turing
• The “Turing test”

• A test proposed to determine if a computer

has the ability to think

• So far no one has built a computer that can

pass that test

• There is cash prize of US$100,000 for the

first computer that passes it
 Terminal

Human
providing
answers
Terminal

Interrogator
asking
questions Computer
on its own
Computer
providing
answers
 Turing Test
• An interrogator is connected to one person and
one machine via a terminal, and can't see her
counterparts

• The interrogator’s task is to find out which of

the two candidates is the machine, and which is
the human only by asking them questions. If the
machine can "fool" the interrogator, it passes
the “Turing Test”.
Enough about Alan Turing and two of his
landmark contributions towards computing

Let’s look at another milestone in the

evolution of computing
 Vacuum Tube - 1904
• John Fleming, an English Physicist, developed the
very first one

• Made electronic computers possible

• The key advantage of tubes was that they made

1000 or more times faster computers possible as
compared with mechanical or electro-mechanical
computers.

• These tubes have now been almost completely

replaced by more reliable and less costly transistors
It was a very useful technology for computing,
but it took 35 years before vacuum tubes
appeared in a computer.

And that first electronic computer was the ABC

 ABC - 1939
• Attanasoff-Berry Computer

• John Attanasoff & Clifford Berry at Iowa State College

• World’s first electronic computer

• The first computer that used binary numbers instead

of decimal

• Was built to help grad students in solving

simultaneous linear equations
 Harvard Mark 1 - 1943
• Howard Aiken of Harvard University

• A large scale, general-purpose computer

• Included all the ideas proposed by Babbage for the

Analytical Engine

• Did not find much use as the electronic-age of

computing had already started. It was just too slow

• It was the last famous electromechanical computer

 ENIAC – 1946
• Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer

• World’s first large-scale, general-purpose electronic

computer. 1000 times faster than the Harvard Mark 1

• Built by John Mauchly & John Echert at the University

of Pennsylvania

• Developed for military applications

• 5,000 operations/sec 19,000 tubes 30 ton 9’ x 80’

• 150 kilowatts: Used to dim the lights in the City of

Philadelphia down when it ran
 Transistor - 1947
• Invented by Shockly, Bardeen, and Brattain at the Bell
Labs in the US

• Compared to vacuum tubes, it offered:

– smaller size
– better reliability
– lower power consumption
– lower cost

• All modern computers are made from miniaturized

transistors
QUESTION:

• Tubes replaced mechanicals

• Transistors replaced tubes

• What is going to replace the transistors?

 Floppy Disk - 1950
• Invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo
by Yoshiro Nakamats

• Provided faster access to programs and

data as compared with magnetic tape

• Magnetic tape (like audio cassette) allows

sequential access to the things that are
stored; floppy disks allow direct access, just
like CD’s
A very important event took place in 1951

Until now, most all computers were designed

for military or government use. And generally
were custom-made for the task

In 1951, the first mass-produced commercial

computer was introduced. It was the …

… UNIVAC 1
 UNIVAC 1 - 1951
• UNIVersal Automatic Computer

• Echert & Mauchly Computer Company

• First computer that could not only manipulate numbers

but text data as well

• Max speed:1905 ops/sec, Cost: US$1,000,000

• 5000 tubes. 943 cu ft. 8 tons. 100 kilowatts

• Between 1951-57, 48 were sold

So far, we have spoken about computer
hardware only

Let us now introduce ourselves to one of the

key events in the evolution of computer
programming …

... the invention of the compiler

 Compiler - 1952
• Grace Hopper, US Navy, develops the very first high-
level language compiler

• Before the invention of the compiler, developing a

computer program was tedious & prone to errors as
the native language of digital computers (consisting of
1’s and 0’s) is very different from how human
communicate

• A compiler translates a high-level language (that is

easy to understand for humans) into a low-level
language that the computer can understand

• We’ll have further discussions on the native language

of computers and compilers later in the course
• Computer hardware is made useful with the
help of programming languages

• What makes computers even more useful is

when they are able to communicate with each
other even if they are located at great
distance from each other

• One of the key milestones in this area was the

formation of ARPANET in 1969
 ARPANET - 1969
• Developed for the US DoD Advanced
Research Projects Agency

• A network of networks

• The grand-daddy of the today’s global Internet

• A network of around 60,000 computers

developed to facilitate communications among
research organizations and universities
• Two of the key features of modern computers
are their low-cost and very small size

• These are made possible due to the use of a

miniature, inexpensive component called a
microprocessor

• The first microprocessor was the Intel 4004

 Intel 4004 - 1971
• Microprocessor: a computer on a chip

• Invented by Ted Hoff at Intel

• Was 1/6 x 1/8in with 2,250 transistors (modern

microprocessors contain 10s of millions of
transistors)

• As powerful as the ENIAC

• Microprocessors led the way towards the
development of micro-computers and PC’s

• The 1st commercial PC is considered to be

the Altair 8800. It was introduced in 1975
 Altair 8800 - 1975
• MITS – Micro Instruments Telemetry Systems

• Based on the Intel 8080 microprocessor

• Cost $397

• Had 256 bytes of memory (my PC at home has

a million times more)

• Input was provided to it through small on-off

switches; it displayed output through a bank of
very small lights
• PC was a new category of computers and
were introduced in 1975

• The very next year another new category of

computers became commercially available -
supercomputers
 Cray 1 - 1976
• The first commercial supercomputer

• Supercomputers: state-of-the-art machines

designed to perform calculations as fast as the
current technology allows

• Used to solve extremely complex tasks:

weather prediction, simulation of atomic
explosions; aircraft design; movie animation

• Cray 1 could do 167 million ops/sec

– Current state-of the-art: trillions (10 12) of ops/sec
• Five years later, in 1981, the most important
event ion the history of computing took place

• Computers finally became popular

• That achievement is credited to the IBM corp.

In 1981 they introduced the IBM PC
 IBM PC & MS DOS - 1981
• IBM PC: The tremendously popular PC; the
grand-daddy of 95% of the PC’s in use today

• MS DOS: The tremendously popular operating

system that came bundled with the IBM PC

• We’ll have some more to say about operating

systems in future lectures
• Three years later, Apple computer introduced
a new PC that radically changed the way in
which computers were operated

• Instead of typing commands, now users could

use a computer simply by moving a mouse
and clicking
 Apple Macintosh - 1984
• The 1st popular, user-friendly PC

• Based on the ideas first developed for the Star

computer at Xerox PARC (1981)
• In 1989, a key event took place that catalyzed
the current, immense popularity of computing

• That event was the invention of the World

Wide Web
 World Wide Web -1989
• Tim Berners Lee – British physicist at the
European Center for Nuclear Energy Research
(CERN) in Geneva

• The greatest collection of information ever put

together by the humankind

• We’ll discuss this topic in much more detail

during the next lecture
• In 1997, computing achieved a goal that
some had though to be impossible,
unachievable

• The best human chess player lost to the

best computer chess playing program
Deep Blue -vs- Kasparov - 1997
It could analyze up to 300 billion
chess moves in three minutes

Deep Blue, a supercomputer designed by IBM,

beat Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion

That computer was exceptionally fast, did not get

tired or bored

It just kept on analyzing the situation and kept on

searching until it found the perfect move from its
list of possible moves
• Until now we have looked at quite a few
events in the history of computing.

• Let’s now now look at the current status

• A good representative of the current

state-of-the-art is the phone-computer
hybrid that anyone can buy these days
 Mobile Phone-Computer
• A small computer, no bigger than the hand-set
of an ordinary desktop or wall mounted phone

• Can do whatever an Internet-capable computer

can do plus can function as a regular phone

• First consumer device formed by the fusion of

computing and wireless telecommunication
What is the next major milestone?(1)
1. Mechanical computing

2. Electro-mechanical

3. Vacuum tube

4. Transistor
(the current state-of the-art)

5. Quantum computing ????

Quantum Computing is based on
the ideas present in the field of

QUANTUM MECHANICS:

the branch of physics that describes

the activity of subatomic particles,
i.e. the particles that make up
atoms
 What is the next major milestone?
(2)
• Quantum computers may one day be millions of
times more efficient than the current state-of-
the-art computers

• They take advantage of the laws that govern

the behavior of subatomic particles
 What is the next major milestone?
(3)
• These laws allow quantum computers to
examine all possible answers to a question,
simultaneously

• For example, if you want to find the largest from

a list of four numbers:
– The current, conventional computers require on
average 2 to 3 steps to get to the answer
– Whereas, the quantum computer may be able to do
that in a single step
What have we learnt today?

We have learnt about some of the important

milestones on the journey that started from the
Analytical Engine and so far has taken us to the
tiny, portable computer-telephone of today

We also saw how computing transitioned from

mechanical to electro-mechanical to tube to
transistor technology and now is poised to take
a breathtaking twist towards quantum computing
 Focus of the Next Lecture
1. Become familiar with one of the most popular activities on
computers – the World Wide Web

2. Become familiar with the Web’s structure and how the Web
works

3. Learn about its genesis, its evolution, and its future

4. About its impact on computing, society, commerce