history of computer hardware

1. Computer History
Charles Babbage and Howard Aiken
In 1936, [Howard] Aiken had
proposed his idea [to build a giant
calculating machine] to the
[Harvard University] Physics
Department, … He was told by the
chairman, Frederick Saunders, that
a lab technician, Carmelo Lanza,
had told him about a similar
contraption already stored up in the
Science Center attic.
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3. Aiken immediately recognized that
he and Babbage had the same
mechanism in mind. Fortunately
for Aiken, where lack of money and
poor materials had left Babbage's
dream incomplete, he would have
much more success
computer history 3

4. The "brass wheels" were a small
demonstration piece for the
Difference Engine I, not the
Analytical Engine. They were one
of six such pieces constructed by
Babbage's son Henry after his
fathers death. These
demonstration pieces were
distributed among various
universities including Harvard.
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5. Aiken must have been sufficiently
intrigued by the mechanism to
investigate Babbage.
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6. it is not clear when Aiken was given
Babbage's "books" or what they
contained. They did not contain
plans of the Analytical Engine since
the only plans have always been
stored at the Science Museum at
Kensington in London. Aiken may
have been able to obtain some
documents which together
comprise the complete published
account of the Analytical Engine.
These documents along with
Babbage's "books" would have
given Aiken a high level description
of Babbage's planned machine.
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7. Charles Babbage's Difference Engine Demo
pieces held at the Science museum in London.
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8. charles Babbage's Analytical
Engine pieces, constructed by
his son.
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9. In 1991 the Science Museum in
London constructed the Difference
Engine II, the printer was added in
2001. These pieces are on display
in the Museum, which is well
worth a visit.
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10. the construction of the Difference
Engine II is documented by Doron
Swade in his book The Difference
Engine. The Difference Engine II
was the last machine Babbage
designed and employs lessons he
learned from both the Difference
Engine I and the Analytical Engine.
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11. Note the drive shaft running along
the bottom of both machines and
the general arrangement with
printers at one end of a long tall
frame. This may be the result of
convergent evolution rather than
direct influence but the similarity is
still striking.
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12. For example the printer was
designed for use by the Analytical
Engine and Babbage reused it for
the Difference Engine II. The
similarity between the Difference
Engine II and the machine that
Aiken built is striking
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13. In the foreword to the manual for the
operation of the Automatic Sequence
Controlled Calculator (ASCC) Howard Aiken
states that "The appendices were prepared
by Lieutenant [Grace] Hopper" with the
assistance of others and that "[She] acted
as general editor, and more than any other
person is responsible for the book." It
seems safe to conclude that Howard Aiken
and Grace Hopper were not only influenced
by Charles Babbage but they and their team
held him in high regard and considered
themselves guardians of his reputation and
inheritors of his quest.
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"If, unwarned by my example, any
man shall undertake and shall
succeed in really constructing an
engine embodying in itself the
whole of the executive department
of mathematical analysis upon
different principles or by simpler
mechanical means,
I have no fear of leaving my
reputation in his charge, for he
alone will be fully able to
appreciate the nature of my efforts
and the value of their results
Charles Babbage

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The staff of the Computation
Laboratory went on to have a
considerable influence on the
development of the modern
computer. Not least of which was
Grace Hooper, who developed the
first compiler and several popular
languages.
The influence of Howard Aiken and
the IBM ASCC – Harvard Mk I
machine on the later development
of computers should not be
overstated.

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"Hartree was very forward looking
and was excited by the
mathematical potential of the
stored program computer.
Douglas Hartree
On the other hand, Aiken was
absorbed in his own way of doing
things and does not appear to have
been aware of the significance of
the new electronic machines."
Unlike Aiken and his machine,
Grace Hopper and some of her
colleagues went on to have a
significant influence in the early
development of compilers and
language design. One wonders
what if any influence Babbage
and Ada Lovelace had on Grace
Hopper's ideas.
Unfortunately I can find no
comments by Hopper regarding
either Babbage or Lovelace.

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The History of Computing
Hardware (1960-Present)
The history of computing hardware starting in1960 is
marked by the conversion from vacuum tube
to solid-state devices
such as the transistor
and
later the integrated circuit.
By 1959, discrete transistors were considered sufficiently
reliable and economical that they made further vacuum
tube computers uncompetitive. Computer main memory
slowly moved away from magnetic core memory devices
to solid-state static and dynamic semiconductor
memory, which greatly reduced the cost, size and power
consumption of computers.

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Third generation
The mass increase in the use of
computers accelerated with 'Third
Generation' computers. These
generally relied on Jack Kilby's
invention of the integrated
circuit (or microchip), starting
around 1966 in the commercial
market.

19. 1961: First Monolithic
Silicon IC Chip. Invented by
Robert Noyce, Fairchild
19
The first integrated circuit was
produced in September 1958, and
computers using them began to
appear in the early 1960s, for
example the 1961 Semiconductor
Network Computer (Molecular
Electronic Computer, Mol-E-Com),
first monolithic integrated circuit
general purpose computer (built
for demonstration purposes,
programmed to simulate a desk
calculator) was built by Texas
Instruments for the US Air Force.

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The integrated circuit enabled the
development of much smaller
computers. The minicomputer was
a significant innovation in the
1960s and 1970s. It brought
computing power to more people,
not only through more convenient
physical size but also through
broadening the computer vendor
field. Digital Equipment

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In November 1966, Hewlett-Packard introduced
the 2116A minicomputer, one of the first
commercial 16-bit computers

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in 1969, Data General introduced the Nova and
shipped a total of 50,000 at $8,000

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The 1965 IBM
System/360 mainframe
computer family are sometimes
called third-generation computers;

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By 1971, the Illiac
IV supercomputer was the fastest
computer in the world, using about
a quarter-million small-
scale ECL logic gate integrated
circuits to make up sixty-four
parallel data processors.

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Third-generation computers were
offered well into the 1990s; for
example the IBM ES9000 9X2
announced April 1994 used 5,960
ECL chips to make a 10-way
processor. Other third-generation
computers offered in the 1990s
included the DEC VAX 9000 (1989),
built from ECL gate arrays and
custom chips, and the Cray
T90 (1995).

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Fourth generation
The basis of the fourth generation was the invention of
the microprocessor by a team at Intel.
processing power and storage
capacities have grown beyond all
recognition since the 1970s, but the
underlying technology has
remained basically the same using
large-scale integration (LSI) or very-
large-scale integration(VLSI)
microchips. It is widely regarded
that most of today's computers still
belong to the fourth generation.

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On November 15,
1971, Intel released the
world's first commercial
microprocessor, the 4004. It
was developed for a Japanese
calculator company
called Busicom as an
alternative to hardwired
circuitry, but computers were
developed around it, with
much of their processing
abilities provided by one small
microprocessor chip.

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The RAM chip was based on an invention
by Robert Dennard of IBM, offering kilobits
of memory on one chip.

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Intel coupled the RAM chip
with the microprocessor,
allowing fourth generation
computers to be smaller and
faster than prior computers.
The 4004 was only capable of
60,000 instructions per
second,

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but its successors brought
ever-growing speed and
power to computers, including
the Intel 8008, 8080 (used in
many computers using
the CP/M operating system),
and the 8086/8088 family.
(The IBM personal computer
(PC) and compatibles use
processors that are still
backwards-compatible with
the 8086.) Other producers
also made microprocessors
which were widely used in
microcomputers.

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Supercomputers
The powerful supercomputers of
the era were at the other end of
the computing spectrum from
the microcomputers, and they also
used integrated circuit technology.
In 1976, the Cray-1 was developed
by Seymour Cray,

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This machine was the first supercomputer to
make vector processing practical. It had a
characteristic horseshoe shape to speed processing
by shortening circuit paths. Vector processing uses
one instruction to perform the same operation on
many arguments; it has been a fundamental
supercomputer processing method ever since. The
Cray-1 could calculate 150 million floating point
operations per second (150 megaflops). 85 were
shipped at a price of $5 million each. The Cray-1 had
a CPU that was mostly constructed
of SSI and MSI ECL ICs.

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Mainframes and minicomputers
Some of the first computers that
might be called "personal" were
early minicomputers such as
the LINC and PDP-8, and later
on VAX and larger minicomputers
from Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC), Data
General, Prime Computer, and
others. They originated as
peripheral processors for
mainframe computers, taking on
some routine tasks and freeing the
processor for computation

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Microprocessor and cost reduction
In the minicomputer ancestors of the modern
personal computer, processing was carried out by
circuits with large numbers of components
arranged on multiple large printed circuit boards.
Minicomputers were consequently physically large
and expensive to produce compared with later
microprocessor systems.

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After the "computer-on-a-chip"
was commercialized, the cost to
produce a computer system
dropped dramatically. The
arithmetic, logic, and control
functions that previously occupied
several costly circuit boards were
now available in one integrated
circuit which was very expensive to
design but cheap to produce in
large quantities.

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Concurrently, advances in
developing solid
state memory eliminated the bulky,
costly, and power-hungry magnetic
core memory used in prior
generations of computers.

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Micral N
Originally, the computer had been designed by
Gernelle, Lacombe, Beckmann and Benchitrite
for the Institut National de la Recherche
Agronomique to automate hygrometric
measurements.

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Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080
The Altair 8800, introduced in a
January 1975 Popular Electronics
magazine article, set a new low
price point for its time

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Microcomputer emerges
The advent of the microprocessor
and solid-state memory made
home computing affordable. Early
hobby microcomputer systems
such as the Altair 8800 and Apple
I introduced around 1975 marked
the release of low-cost 8-bit
processor chips, which had
sufficient computing power to be
of interest to hobby and
experimental users. By 1977 pre-
assembled systems such as.

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the Apple II, Commodore PET,
and TRS-80 (later dubbed the
"1977 Trinity"
by Byte Magazine) began the era of
mass-market home computers;
much less effort was required to
obtain an operating computer, and
applications such as games, word
processing, and spreadsheets
began to proliferate. Distinct from
computers used in homes, small
business systems were typically
based on CP/M, until IBM

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introduced the IBM-PC, which was
quickly adopted. The PC was
heavily cloned, leading to mass
production and consequent cost
reduction throughout the 1980s.
This expanded the PCs presence in
homes, replacing the home
computer category during the
1990s and leading to the current
monoculture of architecturally
identical personal computers

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