Computers In Everything Essay, Research Paper

Computers in some form are in almost everything these days. From Toasters

to Televisions, just about all electronic things has some form of

processor in them. This is a very large change from the way it used to be,

when a computer that would take up an entire room and weighed tons of

pounds has the same amount of power as a scientific calculator. The

changes that computers have undergone in the last 40 years have been

colossal. So many things have changed from the ENIAC that had very little

power, and broke down once every 15 minutes and took another 15 minutes to

repair, to our Pentium Pro 200’s, and the powerful Silicon Graphics

Workstations, the core of the machine has stayed basically the same. The

only thing that has really changed in the processor is the speed that it

translates commands from 1’s and 0’s to data that actually means something

to a normal computer user. Just in the last few years, computers have

undergone major changes. PC users came from using MS-DOS and Windows 3.1,

to Windows 95, a whole new operating system. Computer speeds have taken a

huge increase as well, in 1995 when a normal computer was a 486 computer

running at 33 MHz, to 1997 where a blazing fast Pentium (AKA 586) running

at 200 MHz plus. The next generation of processors is slated to come out

this year as well, being the next CPU from Intel, code named Merced,

running at 233 MHz, and up. Another major innovation has been the

Internet. This is a massive change to not only the computer world, but to

the entire world as well. The Internet has many different facets, ranging

from newsgroups, where you can choose almost any topic to discuss with a

range of many other people, from university professors, to professionals

of the field of your choice, to the average person, to IRC, where you can

chat in real time to other people around the world, to the World Wide Web,

which is a mass of information networked from places around the world.

Nowadays, no matter where you look, computers are somewhere, doing

something.

Changes in computer hardware and software have taken great leaps and jumps

since the first video games and word processors. Video games started out

with a game called Pong…monochrome (2 colors, typically amber and black,

or green and black), you had 2 controller paddles, and the game resembled

a slow version of Air Hockey. The first word processors had their roots in

MS-DOS, these were not very sophisticated nor much better than a good

typewriter at the time. About the only benefits were the editing tools

available with the word processors. But, since these first two dinosaurs

of software, they have gone through some major changes. Video games are

now placed in fully 3-D environments and word processors now have the

abilities to change grammar and check your spelling.

Hardware has also undergone some fairly major changes. When computers

entered their 4th generation, with the 8088 processor, it was just a base

computer, with a massive processor, with little power, running at 3-4 MHz,

and there was no sound to speak of, other than blips and bleeps from an

internal speaker. Graphics cards were limited to two colors (monochrome),

and RAM was limited to 640k and less. By this time, though, computers had

already undergone massive changes. The first computers were massive beasts

of things that weighed thousands of pounds. The first computer was known

as the ENIAC, it was the size of a room, used punched cards as input and

didn’t have much more power than a calculator. The reason for it being so

large is that it used vacuum tubes to process data. It also broke down

very often…to the tune of once every fifteen minutes, and then it would

take 15 minutes to locate the problem and fix it. This beast also used

massive amount of power, and people used to joke that the lights would dim

in the city of origin whenever the computer was used.

The Early Days of Computers

The very first computer, in the roughest sense of the term, was the

abacus. Consisting of beads strung on wires, the abacus was the very first

desktop calculator. The first actual mechanical computer came from an

individual named Blaise Pascal, who built an adding machine based on gears

and wheels. This invention did not become improved significantly until a

person named Charles Babbage came along, who made a machine called the

difference engine. It is for this, that Babbage is known as the “Father of

the Computer.”

Born in England in 1791, Babbage was a mathematician, and an inventor. He

decided a machine could be built to solve polynomial equations more easily

and accurately by calculating the differences between them. The model of

this was named the Difference Engine. The model was so well received that

he began to build a full scale working version, with money that he

received from the British Government as a grant.

Babbage soon found that the tightest design specifications could not

produce an accurate machine. The smallest imperfection was enough to throw

the tons of mechanical rods and gears, and threw the entire machine out of

whack. After spending 17,000 pounds, the British Government withdrew

financial support. Even though this was a major setback, Babbage was not

discouraged. He came up with another machine of wheels and cogs, which he

would call the analytical engine, which he hoped would carry out many

different kinds of calculations. This was also never built, at least by

Babbage (although a model was put together by his son, later), but the

main thing about this was it manifested five key concepts of modern

computers —

? Input device

? Processor or Number calculator

? Storage unit to hold number waiting to be processed

? Control unit to direct the task waiting to be performed and the sequence

of calculations

? Output device

Parts of Babbage’s inventions were similar to an invention built by Joseph

Jacquard. Jacquard, noting the repeating task of weavers working on looms,

came up with a stiff card with a series of holes in it, to block certain

threads from entering the loom and blocked others from completing the

weave. Babbage saw that the punched card system could be used to control

the calculations of the analytical engine, and brought it into his

machine.

Ada Lovelace was known as the first computer programmer. Daughter of an

English poet (Lord Byron), went to work with Babbage and helped develop

instructions for doing calculations on the analytical engine. Lovelace’s

contributions were very great, her interest gave Babbage encouragement;

she was able to see that his approach was workable and also published a

series of notes that led others to complete what he prognosticated.

Since 1970, the US Congress required that a census of the population be

taken every ten years. For the census for 1880, counting the census took

7? years because all counting had to be done by hand. Also, there was

considerable apprehension in official society as to whether the counting

of the next census could be completed before the next century.

A competition was held to find some way to speed the counting process. In

the final test, involving a count of the population of St. Louis, Herman

Hollerith’s tabulating machine completed the count in only 5? hours. As a

result of his systems adoption, an unofficial count of the 1890 population

was announced only six weeks after the census was taken. Like the cards

that Jacquard used for the loom, Hollerith’s punched cards also used stiff

paper with holes punched at certain points. In his tabulating machine,

roods passed through the holes to complete a circuit, which caused a

counter to advance one unit. This capability pointed up the principal

difference between the analytical engine and the tabulating machine;

Hollerith was able to use electrical power rather than mechanical power to

drive the device.

Hollerith, who had been a statistician with the Census Bureau, realized

that the punched card processing had high potential for sales. In 1896, he

started the Tabulating Machine Company, which was very successful in

selling machines to railroads and other clients. In 124, this company

merged with two other companies to form the International Business

Machines Corporation, still well known today as IBM.

IBM, Aiken & Watson

For over 30 years, from 1924 to 1956, Thomas Watson, Sr., ruled IBM with

an iron grip. Before becoming the head of IBM, Watson had worked for the

Tabulating Machine Company. While there, he had a running battle with

Hollerith, whose business talent did not match his technical abilities.

Under the lead of Watson, IBM became a force to be reckoned with in the

business machine market, first as a purveyor of calculators, then as a

developer of computers.

IBM’s entry into computers was started by a young person named Howard

Aiken. In 1936, after reading Babbage’s and Lovelace’s notes, Aiken

thought that a modern analytical engine could be built. The important

difference was that this new development of the analytical engine would be

electromechanical. Because IBM was such a power in the market, with lots

of money and resources, Aiken worked out a proposal and approached Thomas

Watson. Watson approved the deal and give him 1 million dollars in which

to make this new machine, which would later be called the Harvard Mark I,

which began the modern era of computers.

Nothing close to the Mark I had ever been built previously. It was 55 feet

long and 8 feet high, and when it processed information, it made a

clicking sound, equivalent to (according to one person) a room full of

individuals knitting with metal needles. Released in 1944, the sight of

the Mark I was marked by the presence of many uniformed Navy officers. It

was now W.W.II and Aiken had become a naval lieutenant, released to

Harvard to help build the computer that was supposed to solve the Navy’s

obstacles.

During the war, German scientists made impressive advances in computer

design. In 1940 they even made a formal development proposal to Hitler,

who rejected farther work on the scheme, thinking the war was already won.

In Britain however, scientists succeeded in making a computer called

Colossus, which helped in cracking supposedly unbreakable German radio

codes. The Nazis unsuspectingly continued to use these codes throughout

the war. As great as this accomplishment is, imagine the possibilities if

the reverse had come true, and the Nazis had the computer technology and

the British did not.

In the same time frame, American military officers approached Dr. Mauchly

at the University of Pennsylvania and asked him to develop a machine that

would quickly calculate the trajectories for artillery and missiles.

Mauchly and his student, Presper Eckert, relied on the work of Dr. John

Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University.

During the late ‘30’s, Atanasoff had spent time trying to build an

electronic calculating device to help his students solve complicated math

problems. One night, the idea came to him for linking the computer memory

and the associated logic. Later, he and an associate, Clifford Berry,

succeeded in building the “ABC,” for Atanasoff-Berry Computer. After

Mauchly met with Atanasoff and Berry, he used the ABC as the basis for the

next computer development. From this association ultimately would come a

lawsuit, considering attempts to get patents for a commercial version of

the machine that Mauchly built. The suit was finally decided in 1974, when

it was decided that Atanasoff had been the true developer of the ideas

required to make an electronic digital computer actually work, although

some computer historians dispute this decision. But during the war years,

Mauchly and Eckert were able to use the ABC principals in dramatic effect

to create the ENIAC.

Computers Become More Powerful

The size of ENIAC’s numerical “word” was 10 decimal digits, and it could

multiply two of

these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value of each

product from a

Multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was about 1000 times

faster than the previous generation of computers. ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum

tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180,000

watts of electrical power. It had punched card input, 1 multiplier, 1

divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring counters, which

served as adders and also as quick-access (.0002 seconds) read-write

register storage. The executable

instructions making up a program were embodied in the separate “units” of

ENIAC, which

were plugged together to form a “route” for the flow of information. The

problem with the ENIAC was that the average life of a vacuum tube is 3000

hours, and a vacuum tube would then burn out once every 15 minutes. It

would take on average 15 minutes to find the burnt out tube and replace

it.

Enthralled by the success of ENIAC, the mathematician John Von Neumann

undertook, in 1945, a study of computation that showed that a computer

should have a very basic, fixed physical construction, and yet be able to

carry out any kind of computation by means of a proper programmed control

without the need for any change in the unit itself. Von Neumann

contributed a new consciousness of how sensible, yet fast computers should

be organized and assembled. These ideas, usually referred to as the

stored-program technique, became important for future generations of

high-speed digital computers and were wholly adopted. The Stored-Program

technique involves many features of computer design and function besides

the one that it is named after. In combination, these features make very

high speed operations attainable. An impression may be provided by

considering what 1,000 operations per second means. If each instruction in

a job program were used once in concurrent order, no human programmer

could induce enough instruction to keep the computer busy. Arrangements

must be made, consequently, for parts of the job program (called

subroutines) to be used repeatedly in a manner that depends on the way the

computation goes. Also, it would clearly be helpful if instructions could

be changed if needed during a computation to make them behave differently.

Von Neumann met these two requirements by making a special type of machine

instruction, called a Conditional control transfer — which allowed the

program sequence to be stopped and started again at any point – and by

storing all instruction programs together with data in the same memory

unit, so that, when needed, instructions could be changed in the same way

as data.

As a result of these techniques, computing and programming became much

faster, more flexible, and more efficient with work. Regularly used

subroutines did not have to be reprogrammed for each new program, but

could be kept in “libraries” and read into memory only when needed. Hence,

much of a given program could be created from the subroutine library. The

computer memory became the collection site in which all parts of a long

computation were kept, worked on piece by piece, and put together to form

the final results. When the advantage of these techniques became clear,

they became a standard practice.

The first generation of modern programmed electronic computers to take

advantage of these improvements was built in 1947. This group included

computers using Random- Access-Memory (RAM), which is a memory designed to

give almost constant access to any particular piece of information. .

These machines had punched-card or tape I/O devices. Physically, they were

much smaller than ENIAC. Some were about the size of a grand piano and

used only 2,500 electron tubes, a lot less then required by the earlier

ENIAC. The first-generation stored-program computers needed a lot of

maintenance, reached probably about 70 to 80% reliability of operation

(ROO) and were used for 8 to 12 years. This group of computers included

EDVAC and UNIVAC, the first commercially available computers.

Early in the 50’s two important engineering discoveries changed the image

of the electronic-computer field, from one of fast but unreliable hardware

to an image of relatively high reliability and even more capability. These

discoveries were the magnetic core memory and the Transistor – Circuit

Element. These technical discoveries quickly found their way into new

models of digital computers. RAM capacities increased from 8,000 to 64,000

words in commercially available machines by the 1960’s, with access times

of 2 to 3 MS (Milliseconds). These machines were very expensive to

purchase or even to rent and were particularly expensive to operate

because of the cost of expanding programming. Such computers were mostly

found in large computer centers operated by industry, government, and

private laboratories — staffed with many programmers and support

personnel. This situation led to modes of operation enabling the sharing

of the high potential available. During this time, another important

development was the move from machine language to assembly language, also

known as symbolic languages. Assembly languages use abbreviations for

instructions rather than numbers. This made programming a computer a lot

easier.

After the implementation of assembly languages came high-level languages.

The first language to be universally accepted was a language by the name

of FORTRAN, developed in the mid 50’s as an engineering, mathematical, and

scientific language. Then, in 1959, COBOL was developed for business

programming usage. Both languages, still being used today, are more

English like than assembly. Higher level languages allow programmers to

give more attention to solving problems rather than coping with the minute

details of the machines themselves. Disk storage complimented magnetic

tape systems and enabled users to have rapid access to data required.

All these new developments made the second generation computers easier and

less costly to operate. This began a surge of growth in computer systems,

although computers were being mostly used by business, university, and

government establishments. They had not yet been passed down to the

general public. The real part of the computer revolution was about to

begin.

One of the most abundant elements in the earth is silicon; a non-metal

substance found in sand as well as in most rocks and clay. The element has

given rise to the name “Silicon Valley” for Santa Clara County, about 50

km south of San Francisco. In 1965, Silicon valley became the principle

site of the computer industry, making the so-called silicon chip.

An integrated circuit is a complete electronic circuit on a small chip of

silicon. The chip may be less than 3mm square and contain hundreds to

thousands of electronic components. Beginning in 1965, the integrated

circuit began to replace the transistor in machines was now called

third-generation computers. An Integrated Circuit was able to replace an

entire circuit board of transistors with one chip of silicon much smaller

than one transistor. Silicon is used because it is a semiconductor. It is

a crystalline substance that will conduct electric current when it has

been doped with chemical impurities shot onto the structure of the

crystal. A cylinder of silicon is sliced into wafers, each about 76mm in

diameter. The wafer is then etched repeatedly with a pattern of electrical

circuitry. Up to ten layers may be etched onto a single wafer. The wafer

is then divided into several hundred chips, each with a circuit so small

it is half the size of a fingernail; yet under a microscope, it is complex

as a railroad yard. A chip 1 centimeter square it is so powerful that it

can hold 10,000 words, about the size of an average newspaper.

Integrated circuits entered the market with the simultaneous announcement

in 1959 by Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor that they had

each independently produced chips containing several complete electronic

circuits. The chips were hailed as a generational breakthrough because

they had four desirable characteristics.

? Reliability – They could be used over and over again without failure,

whereas vacuum tubes failed ever fifteen minutes. Chips rarely failed —

perhaps one in 33 million hours of operation. This reliability was due not

only to the fact that they had no moving parts but also that semiconductor

firms gave them a rigid work/not work test.

? Compactness – Circuitry packed into a small space reduces equipment

size. The machine speed is increased because circuits are closer together,

thereby reducing the travel time for the electricity.

? Low Cost – Mass-production techniques has made possible the manufacture

of inexpensive integrated circuits. That is, miniaturization has allowed

manufacturers to produce many chips inexpensively.

? Low power use — Miniaturization of integrated circuits has meant that

less power is required for computer use than was required in previous

generations. In an energy-conscious time, this was important.

The Microprocessor

Throught the 1970’s, computers gained dramatically in speed, reliability,

and storage capacity, but entry into the fourth generation was

evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The fourth generation was, in

fact, furthering the progress of the third generation. Early in the first

part of the third generation, specialized chips were developed for memory

and logic. Therefore, all parts were in place for the next technological

development, the microprocessor, or a general purpose processor on a chip.

Ted Hoff of Intel developed the chip in 1969, and the microprocessor

became commercially available in 1971.

Nowadays microprocessors are everywhere. From watches, calculatores and

computers, processors can be found in virtually every machine in the home

or business. Environments for computers have changed, with no more need

for climate-controlled rooms and most models of microcomputers can be

placed almost anywhere.

New Stuff

After the technoligical improvements in the 60’s and the 70’s, computers

haven’t gotten much different, aside from being faster, smaller and more

user friendly. The base architecture of the computer itself is

fundementally the same. New improvements from the 80’s on have been more

“Comfort Stuff”, those being sound cards (For hi-quality sound and music),

CD-ROMs (large storage capicity disks), bigger monitors and faster video

cards. Computers have come a long way, but there has not really been alot

of vast technological improvements, architecture-wise.