LECTURE 1 - THE HISTORY OF COMPUTERS
PART 2 - "GIANT BRAINS": THE RISE OF THE ELECTIONIC COMPUTER
1930's end of the "first dark age" of computing
VIDEO - history of
computers
http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6038804.html
WWII - first all-electronic computers
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| Colossus in operation | Alan Turing |
"...all the essential ideas
of the general-purpose calculating machines now being made are to be found
in Babbage's plans for his analytical engine. In modern times the idea of a
universal calculating machine was independently introduced by Turing..." -
John von Newman
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| ENIAC in operation, 1946 | Two programmers at ENIAC's main control panel |
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| Two of the first six ENIAC programmers setting code at the machine level | |
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| Rapid shrinking of computer hardware in the late 1940s, shown by women involved in the ENIAC project. Patsy Simmers, holding ENIAC board Next: Mrs. Gail Taylor, holding EDVAC board Next: Mrs. Milly Beck, holding ORDVAC board Right: Mrs. Norma Stec, holding BRLESC-I board | |
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| ENIAC engineers and officials | (Male) technician replaces bad tube in ENIAC |
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1940s-1960s the first commercial computers
Origin of the term "Computer Bug" - from Grace Hopper
http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/1996/hopper/bug.htm
At Harvard one August night in 1947,
Hopper
and her associates were working on the "granddaddy" of modern computers, the
Mark II. "Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the
circuits of the long glass-enclosed computer," she said. "Finally, someone
located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a
two-inch moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said
it had bugs in it."
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| Information brochure - describing features and capabilities of the computer. | The CRT (160 byte memory) - why dumb-ass movie guys keep showing computers with blinking lights on the sides |
An early advance in programming computers came when the cable-plugging systems from the 1940s were replaced by flipping switches. Here, two programmers in the 1950s enter data by flipping switches. The program is (fortunately) saved on a tape system to their right.
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| Grace Hopper working with younger coders
on the UNIVAC in the early 1950s
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SAGE - a 1950s military
computer system which evolved into today's airline reservation system (note "light pen" pointing device instead of mouse, touch-screen)
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1960s - 1980s - widespread use of computers by big business, mini-computers for space program,
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Computer used to land on the moon.
RAM = 2000 bytes , ROM = 24,000 bytes. Ran multiple programs in real-time,
accepted manual commands if astronaut needed to override. Steered the Lunar
Module from orbit down to the Moon's surface.
