History of Computer Hardware

Hardware

• 1642 Mechanical Adder
  • Blaise Pascal, Used gears, could add and subtract
• 1670's - Mechanical Calculator
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Could add, subtract, multiply and divide
• 1801 - Jaquard's Loom
  • Joseph-Marie Jacquard metal punched cards, First "stored program" program device
• 1822 - Difference Engine
  • Charles Babbage. Designed to compute polynomials. Used a stored program. Abandoned in 1833.

    

    Charles Babage's (1791-1871) Difference Engine

• 183? Analytic Engine
  • Charles Babbage. General purpose algebraic calculator. Used punched card program. Had a "store" to hold Intermediate results and data. Supported by Ada Augusta, the Countace of Lovelace.

    

    Augusta Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace, the first computer programmer

• 1890 - Census Tabulator
  • Herman Hollerith invented modern punched card for use in machine to help tabulate census. Formed tabulating company that became IBM in 1924.
• 1942 - First Electronic computer
  • John Atanasoft at Iowa State University
• 1944 Mark I
  • Howard Aiken (supported by IBM). Electromechanical computer. First realization of Babbage's Analytic Engine.
• 1946 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)
  • J.P. Eckert and J.W. Mauchly at U. of Penn. Used18000 vacuum tubes. Programmed by rewiring circuits. 1000 x faster than Mark I

ENIAC, a general purpose computer, designed and built by Eckert and Mauchly and
completed in 1946.

• 1951 - UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) Eckert & Mauchly First commercially available general purpose computer

See IEEE pages for more historical information

Computer Generations

• First - used vacuum tubes - UNIVAC
• second - used transistors - IBM 7090
• third - used integrated circuits - silicon
• fourth - used VLSI
• next generation - biological? neural based ?? quantum??

History of the Programming Languages

• 1940's - Rewire Circuits
• Early 1950's - Machine Language: zeros and ones
  • See Fritz Ruehr's simulator
• 1950's - Assembly Language
  • Symbolic Version of Machine Language, Not Portable. Translated by Assembler
• Late 1950's - FORTRAN,
  • Backus at IBM
  • FORMula TRANSlator
  • First High-Level Programming Language
  • First Compiler
• 1960's - Simula
  • Elements of Object-Oriented Languages
• 1970's
  • Pascal, N. Wirth, Teaching Language
  • C
    • Language for Systems Programming.
    • Small and Fairly Portable.
    • Used to Implement Unix on PDP-11.
    • Thompson and Ritchie at Bell Labs.
• Small Talk
  • Fully Object-Oriented
  • Interpreted and Slow
  • Xerox Park
• 1980's, C++
  • Stroustrup at Bell Labs
  • Evolved from C
  • Large, Complex but Fairly Portable
• Java Programming Language
  • Sun Microsystems 1995
  • Evolved from C++ and SmallTalk
  • Object-Oriented
  • Completely Portable

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