-
Difference and Analytical Engines
Mechanical devices
Charles Babbage - Father of the computer
-- designed several of the first programmable computers including the Difference and Analytical Engines
Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace - first programmer -
Hollerith Tabulating Machine
Electro-mechanical device
Herman Hollerith
A punch card system designed as a more efficient means of compiling the 1890 US census.
In 1924, Hollerith's and two other firms became International Business Machines. -
Vacuum tube
First developed by John Ambrose Fleming in 1904. The vacuum tube is a glass tube with its gas removed, creating a vacuum. Vacuum tubes contain electrodes for controlling electron flow and were used in early computers as a switch or an amplifier.
By using vacuum tubes instead of mechanical relays, computers could speed up switching on and off the flow of electrons. -
Period: to
1st Generation of Computers
1940-1956
+ HUGE computers
+ used vacuum tubes
+ machine language
+ paper tape output
Examples: ENIAC, UNIVAC -
Harvard Mark 1
Electro-mechanical device
highly sophisticated calculator, 51 feet long and weighed 5 tons -
ENIAC
ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, was completed in 1946 at a cost of nearly $500,000. It took up 15,000 feet, employed 17,000 vacuum tubes, and was programmed by plugging and replugging some 6,000 switches. It was first used in a calculation for Los Alamos Laboratories in December 1945, and in February 1946 it was formally dedicated. -
EDVAC
Maurice Wilkes
Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer, in which both the data and the programs that would manipulate the data would be stored within the device's memory. -
EDSAC
The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer.[1] Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. EDSAC was the second electronic digital stored-program computer to go into regular service. -
UNIVAC
On June 14, 1951, Remington Rand delivered its first computer, UNIVAC I, to the U.S. Census Bureau. It weighed 16,000 pounds, used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per second. On November 4, 1952, the UNIVAC achieved national fame when it correctly predicted Dwight D. Eisenhower’s unexpected landslide victory in the presidential election after only a tiny percentage of the votes were in. -
transistor
A transistor is an electronic component with three pins. Basically, a transistor is a switch (between two of the pins: the collector and the emitter) that is operated by having a small current in the third pin called the base. -
Period: to
2nd Generation of Computers
1956-1963
+ used transistors
+ assembly language
+ used stored programs (Alan Turing and John Von Neuman)
Examples: EDVAC, EDSAC -
Integrated circuit
Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at TI's Central Research Labs. -
IBM 360
The IBM System/360, the first modular, general-purpose computer -
Period: to
3rd Generation of Computers
1964-1971
+ smaller, cheaper, faster, reliable
+ integrated circuits (Jack Kilby of Tx Instruments)
+ silicon computer chips
+ high level programming languages
+ terminals and monitors connected to mainframes
Examples: IBM - 300 Series, Honeywell-6000 series -
Honeywell 6000 series
a family of 36-bit mainframe computers manufactured by Honeywell International, Inc. from 1970 to 1989 -
microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor which incorporates the functions of a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) on a single integrated circuit (or at most a few integrated circuits). The microprocessor is a multipurpose, clock driven, register based, digital-integrated circuit which accepts binary data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output. -
Period: to
4th Generation of Computers
1972-present
+ microprocessors
+ memory storage increases exponentially and becomes portable
+ personal computers
+ handheld computers
+ new types of input
Examples: Apple Computer, IBM PC -
Apple Computer
Apple Computer, Inc. was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who brought to the new company a vision of changing the way people viewed computers. Jobs and Wozniak wanted to make computers small enough for people to have them in their homes or offices. Simply put, they wanted a computer that was user-friendly. -
Period: to
5th Generation of Computers
2010 - present
+ Artificial Intelligence
+ super conductors and parallel processing
AI allows us to use facial recognition, robotics, and natural language understanding / generation
Examples: SIRI, Alexa -
Apple's Siri
The Siri project began as a research project at Stanford University's Center for Computation and Natural Language (CLN) in 2003. The goal of the project was to create a virtual personal assistant that could perform tasks using natural language processing and machine learning.
Siri is now a virtual voice assistant developed by Apple Inc. that was first released in 2011 with the iPhone 4S -
Amazon Alexa
JEFF BEZOS FIRST sketched out the device that would become the Amazon Echo on a conference room whiteboard in early 2011. He wanted it to cost $20 and be controlled entirely by voice. Its brains would live in the cloud, exploiting the company’s Web Services offerings and allowing Amazon to constantly improve it without requiring owners to upgrade their hardware.
