CSCI 1200 Julie Benoit Introduction To Computing

Announcements : Labs start Monday. as of lunchtime, none were full. lots of space Wednesday. Thursday, teaching lab 2 (35). Mon, Thu & Wed teaching lab 1 (20).

Announcements : TAs Huiqiong Chen Tuesday & Wednesday Franklin Fezeu Monday & Thursday

Announcements : Quiz quiz each week. normally Thurs, announced otherwise. no quiz this week. quiz next week, material from today. 4 Multiple Choice & 2 Short Answer. no make-up quizzes, two lowest grades are dropped.

Announcements : Testing Midterm : February 19 th in class. 25 MC, 10 to 12 SA, matching question. Exam : comprehensive. during the exam period.

History of Computing begins about 5000 years ago. earliest devices help with counting (commerce & inventory). early computing devices are NOT computers.

Motivation People have trouble : –remembering things. –doing calculations. –managing large volumes of data. –completing monotonous tasks.

Abacus memory aid. place value notation. trade increase. very fast.

Abacus the abacus beats the mechanical calculator. Private. T.N. Wood, the fastest mechanical calculator operator in the U.S. Army, used a contemporary state-of-the-art calculator, and was defeated in 4 out 5 speed competitions by Kiyoshi Matsuzaki, who used an abacus.

Pascal’s Calculator (1642) Blaise Pascal. rotating gears. addition & subtraction. father was a tax collector. no commercial success : –expensive. –people worry jobs will be lost. –French currency not based on tens.

Leibniz’s Calculator (1694) like Pascal’s calculator - used gears & dials, but could also multiply. Leibniz studied Pascal's original notes & drawings, then improved on the design before a full four function calculator (Colmar’s Arithometer) was developed - the Arithometer was widely used up until the First World War.

Jacquard Loom (1801) punched cards represent the pattern. person needed much less skill and training to operate a Jacquard loom. Luddites - when technologies like the Jacquard Loom began replacing skilled craftsmen many became angry, and attempted to destroy the machines that put them out of work.

Difference Engine (1821) Charles Babbage. a steam powered, fully automatic machine for solving complex polynomial equations. not completed : –limitations of technology - problem of scale. –very difficult to work with. –interest in another project - Analytical Engine.

Tabulating Machine (1890) Herman Hollerith. data represented on punched cards. cards are sorted based on the position of the holes, data tabulated from the sorted cards. the 1890 US Census is completed in six weeks (rather than in ten years, or more).

Computer a computer is a general-purpose programmable machine. early computing devices : –could not be programmed. –were designed for a specific task. –are NOT computers.

Analytical Engine Babbage's real dream - build a general purpose programmable machine. vision not realizable in the 19th century. overall design, same as the modern computer - four smaller components.

Analytical Engine input - read in a list of instructions. processor - perform the instructions. memory - hold the results of intermediate calculations. output - print out the results.

Analytical Engine Babbage is considered the “father of the computer”. Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage : –credited as the first programmer. –promoter of Babbage’s work. –programming language ADA, developed for the United States Department of National Defense, named in her honour.

Computer a device, usually electronic, that processes data according to a set of instructions (Collins Concise English Dictionary). doesn’t matter how the device is constructed : –electrical, mechanical, optical.

First Computer? John Atanasoff & Clifford Berry (1942) - ABC Computer built with vacuum tubes, solved equations containing 29 variables. Howard Aiken & Grace Hopper (1944) - Mark 1, 55 feet long, 8 feet high, weighed 5 tons, contained nearly 760,000 separate parts, used by the US Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations until 1959.

First Computer? Konrad Zuse (1945) - Z3, world's first electronic, fully programmable computer, used old movie film to store programs and data. John Eckert & John Mauchly (1946) – ENIAC, 1000 times faster than Mark I, constructed using 18,000 vacuum tubes, programmed by manually rewiring and resetting switches, ENIAC weighed 30 tons, a vacuum tube burnt out once every 15 minutes…

First Computer? John Eckert & John Mauchly (1946) – …ENIAC used by the US military to do calculations for the design of the hydrogen bomb, weather prediction, cosmic-ray and random number studies, and wind-tunnel design.

First Computer? John Eckert & John Mauchly (1946) – …ENIAC used by the US military to do calculations for the design of the hydrogen bomb, weather prediction, cosmic-ray and random number studies, and wind-tunnel design.

1 st Generation 1940’s & 1950's. vacuum tubes. huge (30 x 50 feet), could use as much energy as an entire city block of houses. only used by government, military, & large research organizations. tedious - slow to program. expected that the world will never need more than a few dozen computers.

2 st Generation late 1950's & 1960's. constructed using transistors. faster, smaller, more reliable. programming languages like FORTRAN, BASIC and COBOL are introduced - make programming easier. computers are opened up to more applications; airlines & small businesses can now afford them.

3 rd Generation mid 1960's 's. constructed with integrated circuits - smaller transistors and wires on silicone chips. miniaturization makes embedded computers possible; e.g. computers inside elevators, traffic lights and calculators.

4 th Generation 1970's to present. constructed with VLSI - millions of transistors on a single silicone chip). single chip microprocessor. extreme miniaturization, very low costs. Apple Computers is founded in 1976, personal computers become a reality.