Evan Dahl
CS312
Dr. Davendra
October 19, 2017
Research assignment 1
Most people living the United States rely on some type of computer in their everyday lives. Anyone who needs to send an email will have to use a computer. Anyone who needs to turn in homework online will have to use a computer. Computers have existed for a long time but not they started out much different than the ones used today. 50 years ago, technical limitations kept computers much less accessible. Computers were mostly confined to a single room and were much slower. Personal computers did not exist and the concept of mobile computing was just an idea. Multiple innovations and design changes have been able to improve computers since then.
At the University of Pennsylvania John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert built a machine designed for and funded by the United States Military During the 2nd World War. It was called ENIAC and it could make calculations much faster than a human. “ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer” (ENIAC). It is the first general-purpose computer built. Nothing like transistors or microprocessors had been invented yet so ENIAC had to use vacuum tubes to perform binary operations. It cost over $400,000 to make. “ENIAC was made of 17, 468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors” (ENIAC). Its parts took up a lot of space and the whole ended up filling a 30×50 room measuring 1000 square feet. ENIAC was coded using machine language as no advanced languages existed at the time. Instructions were put in manually and not using any kind of memory and changing the program required rewriting it. ENIAC wasn’t finished until after the war but it worked like it was supposed to. It was later used for calculations for the hydrogen bomb.
After Building ENIAC, Mauchly and Presper were hired by the National Bureau of Standards to build a computer for the Census Bureau. The Machine was called the Universal Automatic Computer(UNIVAC). They started building in 1948 and finished in 1951. The design was mostly inspired by ENIAC. It used vacuum tubes and stored data on magnetic tape. “UNIVAC I was soon used to tabulate part of the 1950 population census and the entire 1954 economic census” (PIO). UNIVAC I is considered to be “the first successful civilian computer” (PIO).
After ENIAC, other computers were designed using vacuum tubes and they were also very big and expensive. The Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine(SSEM) became the first “operational stored-program computer” (Kaisler). It “was designed and developed by Tom Kilburn” at the Victoria University of Manchester “between 1946 and 1948 and became operational by 1949” (Kaisler). SSEM could only perform basic arithmetic operations.
Evan as more computers were designed using vacuum tubes and manufacturers learned more, the vacuum tubes still had the same weaknesses. They took used up a lot of energy and they weren’t reliable. Having thousands of vacuum tubes in a single machine would increase the risk of failure. The invention of the transistor made computers much easier to work with as they made the use of vacuum tubes unnecessary.
Transistors are smaller and more reliable than vacuum tubes and use less energy but they were significantly more expensive. “Transistors also flipped on instantaneously, compared to sluggish vacuum tubes, which took several seconds to warm up” (History). The transistor was invented in 1947 by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Laboratories. “In January of 1954, supported by the military, engineers from Bell Labs built the first computer without vacuum tubes” using “almost 800 point-contact transistors” (History). The machine was called the Transistorized Digital Computer(TRADIC) and it measured three cubic feet. This was much smaller than the vacuum tube computers at the time and it used much less power. “It could perform a million logical operations every second” which still wasn’t as fast as many vacuum tube computers.
In order for computers to continue to improve in speed, the transistors needed to get smaller which wasn’t easy. In 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments decided “that all parts of a circuit, not just the transistor, could be made out of silicon” (Integrated Circuits). This would make it “smaller and much easier to produce”. Kilby built a working prototype to demonstrate his idea and Texas Instruments filed a patent in 1959. With these smaller transistors, many of them could be made into a single silicon chip called an integrated circuit. Computer Manufacturers heard about the new technology and it made its way into working computers a few years later.
In 1973 Xerox released the Xerox Alto which was a personal computer before IBM’s personal computers. The Xerox alto used a mouse and a keyboard and it was the first computer to use a graphical user interface. In 1981 IBM released its first personal computer. In 1984 Apple released the Macintosh. Theses used advanced languages which were much easier for humans to read than machine language.
In 1971 Intel developed the first microprocessor called 4004. It was a 4-bit chip and it “was 1/8" by 1/16" with 2300 transistors etched into the silicon” (Invention). It had a 108KHz clock speed and 10-micron (10000 nm) technology. In 1972 Intel released the first 8-bit chip called 8008. It had an 800KHz clock speed and 3,500 transistors. In 1978 Intel released a 16-bit processor called Intel 8086 processor with 29,000 transistors. In 1985 Intel released a 32-bit processor called Intel386 processor with 275,000 transistors.
In 2006 Intel released a 64-bit processor called Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 291 million transistors. It has Intel Core microarchitecture and 2.66 GHz initial clock speed. The growth of the capacity of transistors on chip is described by Moore’s Law named after Gordon Moore. Moore estimated that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. In very recent years chips have not quite managed to be able to live up to this standard though they are still getting faster. Moore’s old predictions could be somewhat outdated.
Computers have progressed a lot in the last few decades. Mobile computing would be impossible if no one ever figured out how to make a computer processing unit as small as it is. Anyone’s mobile device is many times more powerful than machines that used to cost much more to make. Computers will probably continue to change throughout the next several years. We can find out how long it takes before artificial intelligence acts like a human. It is also possible that computers will be able to do things in the next 50 years that no one could have predicted.
Works Cited
"Data Center Solutions, IoT, and PC Innovation." Intel. N.p., n.d. Web.
"ENIAC: A Pioneering Computer." PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 1999. Web.
History of the Transistor. N.p., n.d. Web.
"Integrated Circuits." PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 1999. Web.
"Invention of the Microprocessor." PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 1999. Web.
Kaisler, Stephen H. Birthing the Computer: From Relays to Vacuum Tubes. N.p.: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. Print.
"Manchester – Science – A Short History of Computers." BBC. BBC, n.d. Web.
PIO, Jason Gauthier History Staff. "History." UNIVAC I – History – U.S. Census Bureau. N.p., n.d. Web.