CS101 Notes

CS101 Short Notes

Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

o Creator of the Analytical Engine - the first general-purpose digital computer (1833)

The Analytical Engine

o A programmable, mechanical, digital machine o Could carryout any calculation o Could make decisions based upon the results of the previous calculation o Components: input; memory; processor; output

Ada, Countess of Lovelace(1815-52)

o Babbage: the father of computing

• Ada: the mother?

o Wrote a program for computing the Bernoulli’s sequence on the Analytical Engine - world’s 1st computer program o Ada: A programming language specifically designed by the US Dept of Defense for developing military applications was named Ada to honor her contributions towards computing

A lesson that we all can learn from Babbage’s Life

Charles Babbage had huge difficulties raising money to fund his research

o As a last resort, he designed a clever mathematical scheme along with Ada, the Countess of Lovelace o It was designed to increase their odds while gambling. They bet money on horse races to raise enough money to support their research experiments o Guess what happened at the end? The lost every penny that they had.

1. Fast

2. Bored 3. Storage

Here is a fact:

In 1997 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 …

The “Turing test”

A test proposed to determine if a computer has the ability to think. In 1950, Alan Turing (Turing, 1950) proposed a method for determining if machines can think. This method is known as The Turing Test.

Vacuum Tube – 1904

A vacuum tube is just that: a glass tube surrounding a vacuum (an area from which all gases has been removed). A British scientist named John A. Fleming made a vacuum tube known today as a diode. Then the diode was known as a "valve,"

ABC – 1939

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the world's first electronic digital computer. It was built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University during 1937-42.

Harvard Mark 1 – 1943

Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed the MARK series of computers at Harvard University. clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and 8 feet high. The 5-ton device contained almost 760,000 separate pieces. Used by the US Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations, the Mark I was in operation until 1959.

ENIAC – 1946

ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator). The U.S. military sponsored their researchIt took the team about one year to design the ENIAC and 18 months and 500,000 tax dollars to build it. The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors.

Transistor

The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley. Compared to vacuum tubes, it offered:

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

Floppy Disk – 1950:

Invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Yoshiro Nakamats.

UNIVAC 1 – 1951

The first commercially successful electronic computer, UNIVAC I, was also the first general purpose computer - designed to handle both numeric and textual information. It was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.

Compiler – 1952

Grace Murray Hopper an employee of Remington-Rand worked on the NUIVAC. She took up the concept of reusable software in her 1952 paper entitled " The Education of a Computer" and developed the first software that could translate symbols of higher computer languages into machine language. (Compiler)

ARPANET – 1969

ARPA was assigned to research how to utilize their investment in computers via Command and Control Research (CCR). Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head this effort. Developed for the US DoD Advanced Research Projects Agency

Intel 4004 – 1971

The 4004 was the world's first universal microprocessor.

Altair 8800 – 1975

Developers Edward Roberts, William Yates and Jim Bybee spent 1973-1974 to develop the MITS (Micro Instruments Telemetry Systems ) Altair 8800. The price was $375, contained 256 bytes of memory (not 256k),but had no keyboard, no display, and no auxiliary storage device.

Cray 1 – 1976

The Cray 1 was the world's first "supercomputer," a machine that leapfrogged existing technology when it was introduced in 1971.

IBM PC – 1981

On August 12, 1981, IBM released their new computer, re-named the IBM PC. The "PC" stood for "personal computer" making IBM responsible for popularizing the term "PC".

The first IBM PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor. The price tag started at $1,565, which would be nearly $4,000 today.