Computer history
Now a day has Computer become an integral part of our life. It can be attributed as one of the biggest inventions of mankind. By referring a lot of books, websites, articles I would like to share the information about the history and generations of computers to those who are interested. Let us move to the history of computer technology.
This computer history regarding computing includes various types of traditional devices like Chinese Abacus, Jacquard loom which was used in the year of 1805 and Analytical Engine designed by Charles Babbage in the year 1834.
In this section, I would like to present my views with respect to mechanical, analog and digital computers and their architecture. In our regular life, we are mostly using Marchant calculator was actually designed in the year of late 1960s. In this age for resolving finite difference equations in oil reservoir modeling, analog/digital computers were used. In later days digital computers ensured that they have the capabilities to handle large-scale of computations. The evaluation of digital computers can be divided into Generations. In each generation, these computers acquire amazing improvements with respect to their internal even external architecture and programming languages, over the previous generations. Now let us move to the computer eras.
1623 - 1945:
This period is known as the Mechanical era. In early 17th century, mathematical problems solving starts with machines. Famous mathematicians Pascal, Schickhard and Gottfried designed calculators to compute addition, subtraction, division, and multiplications.
In 1823, Charles Babbage began the designing of Difference Engine for multipurpose computing, but that was not completed. Analytical Engine was a challenging machine. In 1842, he designed but it was partial only. In 1853, George Scheutz and his son Edvard Scheutz studied the idea of Babbage and constructed a machine which process up to 15 digit numbers and calculate IVth order differences. It was won a gold medal in 1855 Paris exhibition. Later it was used for calculating the orbit of Mars. The first mechanical computers were used by US Census Bureau, which used a punch-card mechanism which was designed by Herman Hollerith for the sake of tabulating the data for 1890 census. By collaborating with entrant and became International Business Machines in 1924.
First Generation of Computers - 1937 to 1953
This generation computers were used with electronic switches, in a form of vacuum tubes. The reason for using electronic switches is they are having no moving parts to wear out. One more advantage is they could Open and Close about 1000 times faster than mechanical switches.
In 1937, J.V. Atanasoff attempts to build an electronic computer to solve the differential equations. In 1941 he and with the support of Clifford Berry built a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknown factors. In 1943, Alan Turing designed electronic machine named Colossus which was used to break the codes used by the German army in II-World War.
ENIAC-Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was the first general purpose programmable electronic computer. This ENIAC was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John V. Mauchly at Pennsylvania University. This Colossus machine was not completed until 1945. Later it was used for calculations during the design of the Hydrogen bomb. In 1955, it was used for design random number generators and weather predictions.
ENIAC was operated and controlled by external switches and dials, but for doing settings, it needs physical altering.
On those days software technology was very limited. On those days programs were written directly in machine understandable code, which is nothing but low-level language. In 1950s assembly level, languages were introduced.
Second generations of Computers – 1954 to 1962
In this generation, there were tremendous changes were occurred in the design of the system and scientific applications. Memory storage technology and I/O interface were also introduced in this generations. Index registers for controlling loops and floating point units for calculating real numbers.
In this second generations of computers many high-level languages were introduced. They are namely, FORTRAN(Formula Translation) in 1957, ALGOL(Algorithmic Language) in 1958, COBOL( Common Business Oriented Language) in 1959. IBM 704, 709 and 7094 was also introduced in this era. I/O processors which deal with I/O devices and Memory also introduced in this time.
Third Generation of Computers – 1963 to 1972
In this generation, Integrated circuits(ICs) Semiconductors were used for complex processors. The first IC was based on SSI (Small Scale Integration) circuits. In 1964, Seymour Cray developed CDC 6600 (with the name of Control Data Corporation laboratory) that can perform 1 million floating point operations per second. IBM 360/91 is also released in this generation.
In 1963, CPL (Combined Programming Language) was developed by London and Cambridge universities. In 1967, Martin Richards developed BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language). In 1970, Ken Thompson developed B-Language(Simplification of CPL language) in Bell Labs.
Fourth Generation of Computers – 1972 to 1984
Large Scale Integrations (LSI), Very Large Scale Integrations(VLSI) were used in the construction of Computing Elements. With this help, entire processors fit in one chip. High-speed vector processors like, CRAY1, CYBER 205 was introduced. Micro computers and work stations were also introduced in this fourth generation of computers.In 1972, the king of all programming languages known as C- Programming and UNIX operating system were developed at BELL Labs.
Fifth Generation of Computers – 1984 to 1990
Parallel processing and Multi-threading concepts are evolved in this era. Distributed Memory Architecture was developed in this fourth generation of computers. Networking concepts like, LAN (Local Area Network) and WAN(Wide Area Network) are built in this fifth generation of computers. This period is have noticed with huge increase in the quantity of information and quality of information.
Sixth Generation of Computers – 1990 to –
This generation is beginning with parallel computing, algorithm development, parallel architectures. The internet World Wide Web, www is rapidly evolved in this era. Networking concepts like Client-Server technology, E-Commerce, E-Marketing, E-Business, E-Banking were gain rapid growth in this sixth generation of computers. In this era, we can communicate objects with gestures, which was introduced by Pranav Mistry.
With all this, finally one thing I would like to share with you is Computers and Computer Science is never breaking technology with our lives. These bring us most safe, secure and communicable society. This leads to better civilization.
See you in my next article. Please feel free to give comments or suggestions in the below section.
Thank You.
