Computer History

Computer History Quiz

	French Mathematician
	Invented a calculating machine in 1642
	18 year old son of a tax collector,
	To assist his father in his work.
	Created a numerical wheel calculator
	A train of 8 moveable dials or cogs to add sums of up to 8 figures long.
	As one dial turned 10 notches - or a complete revolution - it mechanically turned the next dial.

	1883 – invented the "Analytical Engine"
	An English mathematician and professor
	Sought a method to accelerate the production of log tables
	Inspired by the Industrial Revolution and the notion of "steam powered" production

	Input, output, memory and central processing unit.
	borrowed the idea of using punch cards to encode instructions acting as a stored memory.
	The "mill" acted as the central processing unit of the machine.
	Also equipped to create printed results

	Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer
	Used to produce ballistic charts during World War II
	US Army commissioned Dr. John Mauchly and John Eckert to design a electronic machine that could compute trajectory tables (1942)
	1943, during the heart of World War II, the United States Army was seeking human ballistics computers in order to keep up with the rapid development of weapons for the war effort.
	Recruited students and graduates and discovered Mauchly's original memorandum about the project
	Realized the possibilities it held for effectively reducing the time and workload at the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory.
	University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. government joined forces
	It could do in two hours nuclear physics calculations which it would have taken 100 engineers a year to do by hand
	Later referred to as a calculator

	Howard Aiken
	Harvard University
	Looking for a method to produce Ballistics charts for the U.S. navy
	International Business Machines (IBM)
	1 million dollar grant

First computer "bug" reported. The "bug" was an moth that
was caught up in the computer. It was discovered by naval
officer and mathematician Grace Murray Hopper.

EDVAC (1948)

 

	John von Neuman
	American mathematician,
	Developed the then original idea that a computer could not only store data and produce results, but that it could also store programs.

	Bell Telephone Labs in 1948
	John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley
	Originally the "transfer resistor"
	Using very small quantities of certain impurities with materials called semiconductors
	Created a tiny switch which controlled the passage of electricity
	Replaced vacuum tubes – 1/13 of the size
	Drastically reducing the size of computing machines

	The UNIVAC
	U.S. Census Bureau
	First commercial computer to attract public attention
	Manufactured by Remington Rand,
	Sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.

	Jack Kilby
	Texas Instrument Labs
	Prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.
	Circuit consisted of a sliver of germanium with five components linked by wires.

	Beginning of the Internet
	Military and Government
	Universities
	Linking computers for communication and sharing information

	1973
	Robert Metcalfe
	Xerox Corporation
	PARC – Palo Alto Research Center

	First personal computer kit
	Ed Roberts the Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Company (MITS)
	Based on the Intel 8080 processor, capable of controlling 6 kilobyes of memory
	January edition of Popular Electronics magazine
	Unassembled kit $395
	No keyboard, no video display and no storage device
	Looked more like a radio with many switched than it did a computer.
	Named after Star Trek TV episode.

	Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
	The Alto - 1974
	Beginning of GUI - graphical user display

	Used images and icons to desiginate commands and programs
	Beginning of use of mouse

Gave up on idea of graphic display and use of mouse The Two Steves took the idea and then started Apple

	Steve Wozniak
	Steve Jobs

Apple Lisa

 

	Inspired by the Alto
	Display was "graphical" - using images and icons to designate commands and programs
	Outrageous price of the Lisa kept it out of reach for many computer buyers
	Jobs and Wozniak to begin work on an improved design that would overcome these failings

IBM PC (1981)

 

	On August 12, 1981 IBM announced its own personal computer
	Using the 16 bit Intel 8088 microprocessor, allowed for increased speed and huge amounts of memory.
	IBM PC rose as the standard in PC computing
	Newer model – IBM PC/XT

Early Programming Languages

 

1957 - FORTRAN

	FORmula TRANslator)
	Enabled a computer to perform a repetitive task from a single set of instructions by using loops.
	First commercial FORTRAN program ran at Westinghouse, producing a missing comma diagnostic.

1960 – COBOL

 

ADMIRAL GRACE HOPPER - part of COBOL Team

 

	Common Business Oriented Language. Designed for business use
	Early COBOL efforts aimed for easy readability of computer programs and as much machine independence as possible.

ASCII Code - 1963

 

	ASCII -- American Standard Code for Information Interchange
	Permitted machines from different manufacturers to exchange data.
	Consists of 128 unique strings of ones and zeros
	Each sequence represents a letter of the English alphabet, an Arabic numeral, an assortment of punctuation marks and symbols, or a function such as a carriage return.

Program Language Developers

 

BASIC – 1964

	Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny
	Students at Dartmouth
	"Easy to Learn"

LISP – 1969

	John McCarthy
	Originally MIT (now at Stanford)
	Writing Artificial Intelligence Programs

LOGO - Seymour Papert – 1967

 

	Designed LOGO as a computer language for children.
	Initially a drawing program
	LOGO controlled the actions of a mechanical "turtle," which traced its path with pen on paper.
	Electronic turtles made their designs on a video display monitor.

APPLE IIE

Macintosh - 1984

 

	Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
	Apple Computer Inc.
	Mouse
	GUI – Graphical User Interface
	Launched on Super Bowl

The World Wide Web

 

	1990
	Tim Berners-Lee
	Research at CERN
	High Energy Physics Lab in Geneva
	Beginning of HTML

Microsoft

Bill Gates - Co-Founder

	1981  - MS-DOS, or Microsoft Disk Operating System
	Basic software for the newly released IBM PC
	Established partnership between IBM and  Microsoft
	Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded only six years earlier.
	1990 - Windows 3.0 - Compatible with DOS programs
	Revamped the interface and created a design that allowed PCs to support large graphical applications for the first time.
	Allowed multiple programs to run simultaneously on its Intel 80386 microprocessor.
	Released Windows in a $10 million publicity blitz. n addition to making sure consumers knew about the product
	Microsoft lined up a number of other applications ahead of time that ran under Windows 3.0, including versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
	PCs moved user-friendly concepts of the Macintosh, making IBM/IBM-compatible computers more popular.

 

Resources

	Computer History Timeline - http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/index.page
	History of the Internet - http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/internet_history/index.page
	History of the Microprocessor - http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/microprocessors/index.page
	History of the World Wide Web - http://www.w3.org/History.html
	The History of Computing - http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
	The Machine that Changed the World - http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/TMTCTW.html
	Scavenger Hunt for The Machine that Changed the World - http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/scavenger.hunt.html
	Hobbes' Internet Timeline - http://www.isoc.org/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
	Triumph of the Nerds - PBS KIDS Timeline - http://www.pbs.org/nerds/timeline/
	IBM History - http://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/
	A Virtual Museum and Gallery of Vintage Computers - http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~hl/mmm.html
	Microsoft History - http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/museum/
	The Apple Museum - http://www.theapplemuseum.com/
	Apple Museum - http://applemuseum.bott.org/

 

 

 

Teaching with Technology

Copyright 2002

Carla Piper, Ed. D.

piper@chapman.edu