Computer History II

Key Events in the History of Computing II Post World War II 1945 Grace Murray Hopper, working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark II computer, found the first computer bug beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stops (frequently) they tell Howard Aiken that they are "debugging" the computer. The very first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. The word bug and the concept of debugging had been used previously, perhaps by Edison, but this was probably the first verification that the concept applied to computers. 14 February 1946 ENIAC was unveiled in Philadelphia. ENIAC represented still a stepping stone towards the true computer, for differently than Babbage, Eckert and Mauchly, although they knew that the machine was not the ultimate in the state-of-the-art technology, completed the construction. ENIAC was programmed through the rewiring the interconnections between the various components and included the capability of parallel computation. ENIAC was later to be modified into a stored program machine, but not before other machines had claimed the claim to be the first true computer. 1946 was the year in which the first computer meeting took place, with the University of Pennsylvania organizing the first of a series of "summer meetings" where scientists from around the world learned about ENIAC and their plans for EDVAC. Among the attendees was Maurice Wilkes from the University of Cambridge who would return to England to build the EDSAC. 1946 Later that year Eckert and Mauchly, in a patent dispute with the University of Pennsylvania, left the University to establish the first computer company -- Electronic Control Corp. with a plan to build the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). After many crises they built the BINAC for Northrop Aviation, and were taken over by Remington-Rand before the UNIVAC was completed. At the same time the Electronic Research Associates (ERA) was incorporated in Minneapolis and took their knowledge of computing devices to create a line of computers; later ERA was also assimilated into Remington-Rand. 1947 William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invent the "transfer resistance" device, later to be known as the transistor that will revolutionize the computer and give it the reliability that could not achieved with vacuum tubes. Transistor Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 1 1948 The work on a stored program computer was ongoing in at least four locations -- at the University of Pennsylvania on the construction of EDSAC, with John von Neumann at Princeton University on the Institute for Advanced Study Machine (IAS), with Maurice Wilkes at Cambridge University, and at the University of Manchester. Douglas Hartree had visited various locations in the US and had returned to England to convince his colleagues, Freddy Williams and Tom Kilburn, to build a computer. Max Newman, one of the leaders of the Bletchley Park activity, had created the Royal Society Computing Laboratory at Manchester, and was looking for a means to build a computer. On June 21, 1948 their prototype machine, the "Baby" was operated for the first time; the world truly moved from the domain of calculators to the domain of computers. Williams, Kilburn, and Newman continued to build a full scale machine they designated the Manchester Mark I. The Ferranti Corporation took the design and began a line of computers that were one of the major components of the British Computer Industry. Mark I occupied only one large laboratory and had a massive (!!!) random access memory of 1024 bits. Mark I – The “Baby” 1948 T.J. Watson Sr., miffed (bad-tempered mood) at Howard Aiken at the lack of recognition at the dedication of the Automatic Sequence Control Calculator [ASCC] (Harvard Mark I) and unnerved by the success of ENIAC, ordered the building of the Selective Sequence Control Computer (SSEC) for IBM. Though not a stored program computer, the SSEC was the first step of IBM from total dedication to punched card tabulators to the world of computers. The publicity pictures of SSEC were modified to exclude the columns in the machine room at the Madison Avenue offices of IBM, after Watson expressed regret that they existed! 1949 Just a year after the Manchester Baby machine became the first operating stored program machine in the world, then first large scale, fully functional, stored-program electronic digital computer was developed by Maurice Wilkes and the staff of the Mathematical Laboratory at Cambridge University. It was named EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer); the primary storage system was a set of mercury baths through which generated and regenerated acoustic pulses represented the bits of data. Wilkes had been an attendee at the 1946 Summer School at the University of Pennsylvania and come home with the basic plans for a machine in his mind. Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 2 1949 Back in the US the National Bureau of Standards began work on two machines. The Bureau had been made responsible for managing the contract for the delivery of the UNIVAC to the Census Bureau, but recognized that it needed computational facilities for its own work. Not having an overwhelming budget, the Bureau decided to emulate the National Physical Laboratory (its UK equivalent) and build its own machines. These were to be placed in the east and west coast centers. Sam Alexander took charge of the development of the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), while Harry Huskey (builder of the Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory [NPL], the British equivalent of NBS) led the development of the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) 1950s In the fifties, the PGEC became an organization with many elements of present Computer Society, excepting the technical and education committees. Conferences were the most significant activity, but publications grew rapidly with some 1,800 editorial pages generated during the decade. 1950 After World War II and his work at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing joined the staff of the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, England, with plans to build his own computer. His design for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was completed in 1947 but the director of the Laboratory gave the task of construction to the Physics rather than the Mathematics department, where Turing resided, and consequently Turing left NPL to take up a position with his war-time boss, Max Newman, at the University of Manchester. The work on a prototype machine based on Turing's plans, named Pilot Ace, was designed by Harry Huskey in 1948 and completed in 1951. The full scale version was completed several years later by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. 1951 Jay Forrester, Bob Everett and others at MIT began work on a simulator for the Air Force in late 1946, but changed their minds about the use of analog techniques, deciding instead to use digital processing to produce the first real-time processing computer -- the Whirlwind. This work is also well known for the development of core memory. The basic concept for core memory had been patented by An Wang, Harvard University, in 1949, but his technique involved using the cores on single wires to form delay lines. The Whirlwind Project conceived the technique of stringing the cores (a memory, consisting of a series of tiny doughnut-shaped masses of magnetic material) onto a matrix of wires and thus producing a random access memory. Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 3 Below: Alan Turing Left: Pilot Ace, was designed by Harry Huskey in 1948 and completed in 1951. 1951 After five years of work of the first computer company established by Eckert and Mauchly, the UNIVAC computer was delivered to the Census Bureau, just in time to begin work on the decennial census. Somewhat over budget, the hope for the Remington-Rand Corporation was that they could produce a sufficient number of copies to recover their losses on a 1946 fixed-price contract with the government. Eventually several copies would be built and delivered to a wide variety of both government and commercial users. 1951 Maurice Wilkes had realized quickly after the completion of the work on EDSAC at Cambridge University that "a good part of the remainder of [his] life was going to be spent in finding errors in programs." With Stanley Gill and David Wheeler he developed the concept of subroutines in programs to create re-usable modules; together they produced the first textbook on "The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer", (Addison- Wesley Publ. Co., New York, 1951). The formalized concept of software development (not to be named for a decade) had its beginning. 1951 The third of Howard Aiken's machines, the Mark III was delivered to the Naval Surface Weapons Center, Dahlgren, Virginia in March 1951. The Mark III was notable for being the first full scale machine to include drum memory, even though Aiken still insisted on keeping the data and the instructions on separate (and slightly different sized) drums. The Time magazine, in a painting by Artzybasheff, featured the Mark III on the cover; the first time a computer appeared. The painting is now at Harvard University. Painting by Artzybasheff depicting Mark III Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 4 1952 Grace Hopper, by now an employee of Remington-Rand and working on the UNIVAC, took up the concept of reusable software in her 1952 paper entitled "The Education of a Computer", (Proc. ACM Conference, reprinted Ann. Hist.

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