Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Scientific Needs:
Accurate math tables,
complex scientific
calculations
Business automation: Artillery Calculator
Payroll, accounting
Government needs:
Census tabulation, employee
records, tax files (!)
Military requirements:
Artillery tables, decryption,
nuclear weapon design
Eniwetok Atoll, 1952
The First Computers
Scientists begin to design calculating
machines in the 1800s.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
designed the first complex
mechanical computer in 1834.
He and colleagues attempted to build
a steam-powered model with 20,000
funding from the British government.
The machine was never finished (due
to limitations of mid-19th century
technology), but a copy built in the
1990s actually worked!
It was the work of mathematician
George Boole, later in the 19th Reproduction of the Babbage Difference
century, that would lead the way for Engine built in the early 1990s.
modern computing.
Two Other Early Mechanical Computers
Computer
Relay
The third generation of electronic computers were the first built with
integrated circuits, solid-state circuits with multiple transistors
(and other circuit elements) on the same chip of silicon.
The computer shown above is the Control Data Corporation Model
7600, one of the first computers built with integrated circuits and also
one of the first scientific super computers (cost: > $5 million!).
Fourth-Generation Electronic Computers
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10111.101 --
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Homework
Write down the two or three most important things you
learned today. Put this in a list format that you can add
to as the semester continues.
Write down two or three things you did not clearly
understand. After finishing the assigned reading, if you
still have questions, see me during office hours.
Patterson and Hennessy, 1.
Read Pervin, chapter 0.
Read Tokheim, chapters 1-2.
Start work on homework #1.