History and Origin of Computers and Their Generations
History and Origin of Computers and Their Generations
A complete history of computing would include a wide diversity of devices such as the ancient abacus, the Jacquard Loom (1805), Charles Babbage’s computers along with mechanical, analog and digital computing Devices or architectures. Before the invention of first general purpose computing device certain devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years by our ancestors. They mostly used one-to-one correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was probably a form of tally stick, counting rod etc.
The following are the some of the computing Devices used
before the invention of first general purpose computing Device:
The Ishango bone
The Abacus (roman Abacus) first
used Babylonia as early as 2400 B.C., can be considered as the seed for modern
era computing devices.
The Abacus
The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be
the earliest mechanical analog "computer". It was designed to
calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck
off the Greek island of Antikythera,
between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to circa
100 BC.
The Antikythera mechanism
The slide rule was invented around
1620–1630, shortly after the publication of the concept of the logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog
computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development
progressed, added scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes
and cube roots, as well as transcendental
functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular and
hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions.
Aviation is one of the few fields where slide rules are still in widespread
use, particularly for solving time–distance problems in light aircraft. To save
space and for ease of reading, these are typically circular devices rather than
the classic linear slide rule shape.
The slide rule
In the 1770s Pierre Jaquet-Droz,
a Swiss watchmaker, built a mechanical doll (automata)
that could write holding a quill pen. By switching the number and order of its
internal wheels different letters, and hence different messages, could be
produced. In effect, it could be mechanically "programmed" to read
instructions. Along with two other complex machines, the doll is at the Musée
d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and still operates.
FIRST GENERAL-PURPOSE COMPUTING DEVICE (Babbage’s computers):
Charles
Babbage (1791-1871), an English mechanical engineer and polymath, originated the concept of a programmable
computer. He is considered as the "father of the computer", he
conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer
in the early 19th century. He invented a viable mechanical computer equivalent
to modern digital computer, known as Babbage's Difference engine.
Difference engine.After working on his revolutionary difference engine, designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that a much more general design, an Analytical Engine, was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards, a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.
Analytical EngineThe machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his machine had to be made by hand - this was a major problem for a device with thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was dissolved with the decision of the British Government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to difficulties not only of politics and financing, but also to his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than anyone else could follow. Nevertheless his son, Henry Babbage, completed a simplified version of the analytical engine's computing unit (the mill) in 1888. He gave a successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906.
THE ANALONG COMPUTERS:
During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation. However, these were not programmable and generally lacked the versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers.The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir William Thomson in 1872. The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson, the brother of the more famous Lord Kelvin.
Tide-predicting machineThe art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer, built by H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MIT starting in 1927. This built on the mechanical integrators of James Thomson and the torque amplifiers invented by H. W. Nieman. A dozen of these devices were built before their obsolescence became obvious. By the 1950s the success of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but analog computers remain in use in some specialized applications such as education (control systems) and aircraft (slide rule).
THE DIGITAL COMPUTERS:
He also introduced the notion of a 'Universal Machine' (now known as a Universal Turing machine), with the idea that such a machine could perform the tasks of any other machine, or in other words, it is provably capable of computing anything that is computable by executing a program stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. Von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper. Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation. Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, modern computers are said to be Turing-complete, which is to say, they have algorithm execution capability equivalent to a universal Turing machine.
THE FIRST ELECTROMECHANICAL COMPUTERS:
The first electromechanical computer was developed by US Navy in 1938 that was small enough to aboard a submarine. This was the TORPEDO DATA COMPUTER (TDC), which used trigonometry to solve the problems of firing a torpedo from a boat to a moving target. During World War II Britain, Germany and Japan also developed automated torpedo fire control equipment, but none were as advanced as the US Navy’s TDC, as it was able to automatically track the target rather than simply offering an instantaneous firing solution.
US Navy’s TDCEarly digital computers were electromechanical; electric switches drove mechanical relays to perform the calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes. The Z2, created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939, was one of the earliest examples of an electromechanical relay computer. It was an improvement on the Z1, using the same mechanical memory but replacing the arithmetic and control logic with electrical relay circuits.
Electromechanical Relay
In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3, the world's first working electromechanical programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was built with 2000 relays, implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz Program code and data were stored on punched film. It was quite similar to modern machines in some respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating point numbers. Replacement of the hard-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage's earlier design) by the simpler binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at that time. The Z3 was probably a complete Turing machine.
Replica of Zuse's
Z3
The Golden era in the history of computer
development started with the invention and development of Electronic computers
in different generation. Here I have try to describe the development of
electronics computers in SIX
Different generation. Each of the six generations of computers is characterized
by a major technological development that fundamentally changed the way
computers operate, resulting in increasingly smaller, cheaper, more powerful
and efficient computing devices.
First Generation Electronic Computers (1937-1953):
Three machines have been promoted
at various times as the first electronic computers. These machines used
electronic switches, in the form of vacuum tubes, instead of electromechanical
relays. In principle the electronic switches would be more reliable, since they
would have no moving parts that would wear out, but the technology was still
new at that time and the tubes were comparable to relays in reliability.
Electronic components had one major benefit, however: they could ``open'' and
``close'' about 1,000 times faster than mechanical switches. Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their
mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, at the same time that digital
calculation replaced analog.
The engineer Tommy Flowers, working at the
Post Office Research Station in London in the 1930s,
began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange. Experimental equipment that he
built in 1934 went into operation 5 years later, converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data
processing system, using thousands of vacuum tubes. In the US, John
Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and
tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942, the first
"automatic electronic digital computer". This design was also
all-electronic and used about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a
mechanically rotating drum for memory.
A second early electronic machine was Colossus, designed by Alan Turing for the British military in 1943. This machine played an important role in breaking codes used by the German army in World War II. Turing's main contribution to the field of computer science was the idea of the Turing machine, a mathematical formalism widely used in the study of computable functions. The existence of Colossus was kept secret until long after the war ended, and the credit due to Turing and his colleagues for designing one of the first working electronic computers was slow in coming.
ColossusColossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable computer. It used a large number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to perform a variety of Boolean logical operations on its data, but it was not Turing-complete.
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. Work began in 1943, funded by the Army Ordnance Department, which needed a way to compute ballistics during World War II. The machine wasn't completed until 1945, but then it was used extensively for calculations during the design of the hydrogen bomb. By the time it was decommissioned in 1955 it had been used for research on the design of wind tunnels, random number generators, and weather prediction. Eckert, Mauchly, 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. There is some controversy over who deserves the credit for this idea, but none over how important the idea was to the future of general purpose computers. ENIAC was controlled by a set of external switches and dials; to change the program required physically altering the settings on these controls. These controls also limited the speed of the internal electronic operations. 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, EDVAC was able to run orders of magnitude faster than ENIAC.
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. Although the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus it was much faster and more flexible. It was unambiguously a Turing-complete device and could compute any problem that would fit into its memory. Like the Colossus, a "program" on the ENIAC was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored program electronic machines that came later.
Once a program was written, it had to be mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000 times a second, a thousand times faster than any other machine. It also had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was limited to 20 words (about 80 bytes). The machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, using 200 kilowatts of electric power and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors.
ENIAC (Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer)SECOND GENERATION (1954-1962):
The second generation saw several important
developments at all levels of computer system design, from the technology used
to build the basic circuits to the programming languages used to write
scientific applications. Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing
its function required the re-wiring and re-structuring of the machine. With the
proposal of the stored-program computer this changed.
A stored-program computer
includes by design an instruction set and can store in
memory a set of instructions (a program) that details the computation. The theoretical basis
for the stored-program computer was laid by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In
1945 Turing joined the National
Physical Laboratory and began work on developing an
electronic stored-program digital computer. His 1945 report ‘Proposed
Electronic Calculator’ was the first specification for such a device. John von Neumann at the University of
Pennsylvania, also circulated his First
Draft of a Report on the EDVAC in 1945.
A section of the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental
Machine.As soon as the SSEM had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a more usable computer, the Manchester Mark 1.
The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. Built by Ferranti, it was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951. At least seven of these later machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, one of them to Shell labs in Amsterdam. In October 1947, the directors of British catering company J. Lyons & Company decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of computers.
The LEO I computer became operational in April 1951 and ran the world's first regular routine office computer job.
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. Memory technology was based on magnetic cores which could be accessed in random order, as opposed to mercury delay lines, in which data was stored as an acoustic wave that passed sequentially through the medium and could be accessed only when the data moved by the I/O interface.
A bipolar transistorThe bipolar transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onwards transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the "second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Silicon junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space.
At the University of Manchester, a team under the leadership of Tom Kilburn designed and built a machine using the newly developed transistors instead of valves. Their first transistorised computer and the first in the world, was operational by 1953, and a second version was completed there in April 1955. However, the machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory, so it was not the first completely transistorized computer. That distinction goes to the Harwell CADET of 1955, built by the electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.
Important innovations in computer architecture included index registers for controlling loops and floating point units for calculations based on real numbers. Prior to this accessing successive elements in an array was quite tedious and often involved writing self-modifying code (programs which modified themselves as they ran; at the time viewed as a powerful application of the principle that programs and data were fundamentally the same, this practice is now frowned upon as extremely hard to debug and is impossible in most high level languages). Floating point operations were performed by libraries of software routines in early computers, but were done in hardware in second generation machines.
During this second generation many high level programming languages were introduced, including FORTRAN (1956), ALGOL (1958), and COBOL (1959). Important commercial machines of this era include the IBM 704 and its successors, the 709 and 7094. The latter introduced I/O processors for better throughput between I/O devices and main memory.
The second generation also saw the first two supercomputers designed specifically for numeric processing in scientific applications. The term ``supercomputer'' is generally reserved for a machine that is an order of magnitude more powerful than other machines of its era. Two machines of the 1950s deserve this title. The Livermore Atomic Research Computer (LARC) and the IBM 7030 (aka Stretch) were early examples of machines that overlapped memory operations with processor operations and had primitive forms of parallel processing.
THIRD GENERATION (1963-1972):
The third generation brought huge gains in computational power. Innovations in this era include the use of integrated circuits, or ICs (semiconductor devices with several transistors built into one physical component), semiconductor memories starting to be used instead of magnetic cores, microprogramming as a technique for efficiently designing complex processors, the coming of age of pipelining and other forms of parallel processing and the introduction of operating systems and time-sharing.The next great advance in computing power came with the advent of the integrated circuit (ICs). The idea of the integrated circuit was first conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the Ministry of Defence, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. Dummer presented the first public description of an integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. on 7 May 1952.
ICsThe first practical ICs were invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor. The first ICs were based on small-scale integration (SSI) circuits, which had around 10 devices per circuit (or ``chip''), and evolved to the use of medium-scale integrated (MSI) circuits, which had up to 100 devices per chip. Multilayered printed circuits were developed and core memory was replaced by faster, solid state memories. Computer designers began to take advantage of parallelism by using multiple functional units, overlapping CPU and I/O operations, and pipelining (internal parallelism) in both the instruction stream and the data stream. 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 1 million floating point operations per second (1 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 10 Mflops. The IBM 360/91, released during the same period, was roughly twice as fast as the CDC 660. It employed instruction look ahead, separate floating point and integer functional units and pipelined instruction stream. The IBM 360-195 was comparable to the CDC 7600, deriving much of its performance from a very fast cache memory. The SOLOMON computer, developed by Westinghouse Corporation, and the ILLIAC IV, jointly developed by Burroughs, the Department of Defence and the University of Illinois, was representative of the first parallel computers.
The Texas Instrument Advanced Scientific Computer (TI-ASC) and the STAR-100 of CDC were pipelined vector processors that demonstrated the viability of that design and set the standards for subsequent vector processors. Early in this third generation Cambridge 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.
FOURTH GENERATION (1972-1984):
The next generation of computer systems saw the use of large scale integration (LSI - 1000 devices per chip) and very large scale integration (VLSI - 100,000 devices per chip) in the construction of computing elements. At this scale entire processors will fit onto a single chip, and for simple systems the entire computer (processor, main memory, and I/O controllers) can fit on one chip. Gate delays dropped to about 1ns per gate.
VLSISemiconductor memories replaced core memories as the main memory in most systems; until this time the use of semiconductor memory in most systems was limited to registers and cache. During this period, high speed vector processors, such as the CRAY 1, CRAY X-MP and CYBER 205 dominated the high performance computing scene. Computers with large main memory, such as the CRAY 2, began to emerge. A variety of parallel architectures began to appear; however, during this period the parallel computing efforts were of a mostly experimental nature and most computational science was carried out on vector processors. Microcomputers and workstations were introduced and saw wide use as alternatives to time-shared mainframe computers.
Developments in software include very high level languages such as FP (functional programming) and Prolog (programming in logic). These languages tend to use a declarative programming style as opposed to the imperative style of Pascal, C, FORTRAN, et al. In a declarative style, a programmer gives a mathematical specification of what should be computed, leaving many details of how it should be computed to the compiler and/or runtime system. These languages are not yet in wide use, but are very promising as notations for programs that will run on massively parallel computers (systems with over 1,000 processors). Compilers for established languages started to use sophisticated optimization techniques to improve code, and compilers for vector processors were able to vectorize simple loops (turn loops into single instructions that would initiate an operation over an entire vector).
Two important events marked the early part of the third generation: the development of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system, both at Bell Labs. In 1972, Dennis Ritchie, seeking to meet the design goals of CPL and generalize Thompson's B, developed the C language. Thompson and Ritchie then used C to write a version of UNIX for the DEC PDP-11. This C-based UNIX was soon ported to many different computers, relieving users from having to learn a new operating system each time they change computer hardware. UNIX or a derivative of UNIX is now a de facto standard on virtually every computer system
.
An important event in the development of computational science was the publication of the Lax report. In 1982, the US Department of Defence (DOD) and National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a panel on Large Scale Computing in Science and Engineering, chaired by Peter D. Lax. The Lax Report stated that aggressive and focused foreign initiatives in high performance computing, especially in Japan, were in sharp contrast to the absence of coordinated national attention in the United States.
The report noted that university researchers had inadequate access to high performance computers. One of the first and most visible of the responses to the Lax report was the establishment of the NSF supercomputing centers. Phase I on this NSF program was designed to encourage the use of high performance computing at American universities by making cycles and training on three (and later six) existing supercomputers immediately available. Following this Phase I stage, in 1984-1985 NSF provided funding for the establishment of five Phase II supercomputing centres.
The Phase II centers, located in San Diego (San Diego Supercomputing Center); Illinois (National Center for Supercomputing Applications); Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center); Cornell (Cornell Theory Center); and Princeton (John von Neumann Center), have been extremely successful at providing computing time on supercomputers to the academic community. In addition they have provided many valuable training programs and have developed several software packages that are available free of charge. These Phase II centers continue to augment the substantial high performance computing efforts at the National Laboratories, especially the Department of Energy (DOE) and NASA sites.
FIFTH GENERATION (1984-1990):
The development of the next generation of computer systems is characterized mainly by the acceptance of parallel processing. Until this time parallelism was limited to pipelining and vector processing, or at most to a few processors sharing jobs. The fifth generation saw 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 an incredible pace - by 1990 it was possible to build chips with a million components - and semiconductor memories became standard on all computers.Other new developments were the widespread use of computer networks and the increasing use of single-user workstations. Prior to 1985 large scale parallel processing was viewed as a research goal, but two systems introduced around this time are typical of the first commercial products to be based on parallel processing. The Sequent Balance 8000 connected up to 20 processors to a single shared memory module (but each processor had its own local cache). The machine was designed to compete with the DEC VAX-780 as a general purpose Unix 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
Scientific computing in this period was still dominated by vector processing. Most manufacturers of vector processors introduced parallel models, but there were very few (two to eight) processors in these parallel machines. In the area of computer networking, both wide area network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) technology developed at a rapid pace, stimulating a transition from the traditional mainframe computing environment toward a distributed computing environment in which each user has their own workstation for relatively simple tasks (editing and compiling programs, reading mail) but sharing large, expensive resources such as file servers and supercomputers. RISC technology (a style of internal organization of the CPU) and plummeting costs for RAM brought tremendous gains in computational power of relatively low cost workstations and servers. This period also saw a marked increase in both the quality and quantity of scientific visualization.
SIXTH GENERATION (1990 - Present and Beyond):
This generation is beginning with many gains in parallel computing, both in the hardware area and in improved understanding of how to develop algorithms to exploit diverse, massively parallel architectures. Parallel systems now compete with vector processors in terms of total computing power and most expect parallel systems to dominate the future. With the continued miniaturization of computing resources, and advancements in portable battery life, portable computers grew in popularity in the 2000s.
The same developments that spurred the growth of laptop computers and other portable computers allowed manufacturers to integrate computing resources into cellular phones. These so-called smartphones and tablets run on a variety of operating systems and have become the dominant computing device on the market, with manufacturers reporting having shipped an estimated 237 million devices in 2Q 2013.
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