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Presentation on theme: "Computers in Society History of Computing. Homework Assignment #3 is ready to go – let’s have a look. Questions about HW1? More people to schedule for."— Presentation transcript:

1 Computers in Society History of Computing

2 Homework Assignment #3 is ready to go – let’s have a look. Questions about HW1? More people to schedule for HW2? Start thinking about a term paper topic!

3 Futurism Can we understand the future of computing? What sort of predictions have been made?

4 Looking Back to Look Ahead Perhaps the best way to look into the future of computing is to look back. Many predictions have been made – in books, in movies, by academics, by entertainers, by companies. Most of these predictions have been very wrong! What are some examples of “serious” predictions about the future of computing?

5 Dubious Quotes "Everything that can be invented has been invented." — Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." — Popular Mechanics, 1949 "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." — The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957. "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." — Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977. "640K (of memory) ought to be enough for anybody." — Bill Gates, 1981. "If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." — Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld

6 A Tour of The Computer * Processing * Memory * Transmission * Interfacing with the real world It is important to understand how we assess these things! What makes one device better than another?

7 The Computing Element John Von Neumann, one of the pioneers of computing, used the word “Organ” to describe these elements. The biological metaphors started from day 1 … The original computing element was the human brain. But eventually mechanical devices were created to speed up the calculation process. The apex of mechanical computing was Babbage’s “analytical engine”, a device too complex to ever work. This early computing was mathematical – building tables of numbers for navigation and engineering purposes.

8 Historical Computing Devices

9 Electronic Computing The big innovation in computing was the replacement of mechanical computing devices by purely electronic ones. A gear or relay is too big / slow / unreliable to use in large quantities. An electronic switch has no moving parts – it operates by pushing electrons around. The original electronic computers used vacuum tubes – later transistors took over.

10 Electronic Gates A gate is a device in which one signal controls another. In a vacuum tube, the grid could block or allow flow from input to output. So this is just like a relay. Transistors are very similar – just a lot smaller.

11 Silicon The “computer revolution” came about when VLSI technology allowed a single chip to contain LOTS of transistors. A Pentium has about 50 million transistors. That would have been a lot of vacuum tubes. Manufacturing cost is something like $0.000001 per transistor. Note that computers are built from a single part!

12 Timeline 2500BC – 300BC: Abacus 1617: Napier’s Bones 1820: First mass-produced mechanical calculators 1822: Babbage’s difference engine 1930: motorized mechanical calculators able to quickly add, subtract, multiply, divide 1940s: digital computers (vacuum tubes)

13 Timeline 1950s: computers are mass produced and become common in the business world 1960s: transistors give way to integrated circuits 1980s: personal computing arrives Now: a typical computer can do 5 – 10 million numeric calculations per second (MFLOP)

14 Assessing Computation How can we assess a computational technology? This turns out to be REALLY HARD! Knowing how fast a device can do one task doesn’t tell us a lot about other tasks. Approaches: Clock rate (not very accurate) MFLOP (only helps for numeric calculations) Specific benchmarks Units: tasks / second


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