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Brief History of Computer Systems, Software, and Programming The Brief History of Computer Systems, Software, and Programming The first modern computer came into existence in the 1940s. No single person invented the computer—the credit goes to the many inventors who have worked on different pieces of the computer over the years. Man’s quest to simplify mathematical computations has led to extensive research, algorithm development, and other innovations. Laptops, tablets, smartphones, and many other devices are a product of these innovations. This article will detail the history of these innovations in mathematics, programming, and software and computer system design. What Is a Computer? A computer is an electronic device that stores and processes data. It comprises both hardware and software. The term hardware refers to the physical aspects of the computer and comprises the following main components: 1. central processing unit (CPU); 2. memory; 3. storage devices (disks, CDs, and tapes); 4. input and output devices (monitors, keyboards, mice, and printers). All these components are connected to each other through the system bus. The figure below provides a visual overview of the main parts of the computer. Figure 1: The main components of a computer. Computer programs are written by programmers, and they guide the computer through an orderly set of actions to perform some operation. The term software refers to these programs that instruct hardware to perform specific tasks. The instructions to the http://www.saylor.org/courses/cs101/#1.1 The Saylor Foundation Saylor.org Page 1 of 9 computer can be given using different programming languages. These languages have evolved over time. History of Computing The earliest device to keep track of calculations was an abacus. It was used around 50 BC and was very popular in Asia. A popular form of abacus is shown below. Figure 2: An abacus.1 John Napier, a Scottish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, defined natural logarithms in 1614 to simplify calculations. The use of logarithms greatly simplified the complex astronomical, navigational, mathematical, and scientific calculations that were commonplace at that time. He also invented Napier’s bones, a mathematical tool that used a set of numbered rods to simplified multiplication. Figure 3: Napier’s bones.2 1 This image is in the public domain. The original can be found here. 2 This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. It is attributed to Wikipedia user La Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español. The original can be found here. http://www.saylor.org/courses/cs101/#1.1 The Saylor Foundation Saylor.org Page 2 of 9 Charles Babbage, a British mathematician and inventor, first proposed the idea of a programmable computer. While studying complex astronomical calculations that others had done by hand, he found numerous mistakes, which motivated him to design a “mechanical computer” that could do these calculations without errors. Though he designed such a machine, it was never built during his lifetime. The need for programming came with the idea of making general purpose hardware that could be used to carry out a variety of tasks. Ada Lovelace, who was the world’s first programmer, published a paper in which she demonstrated how Babbage’s analytical engine could be programmed to perform various computations. Another device called a punch card was used in the late 1800s to keep track of data that could be read by machines. Punch cards stored information in digital format, which was represented at the time by specific series of holes in paper cardstock. Herman Hollerith applied the idea of representing information as holes in paper cards to speed up the tabulation process in the 1890 US Census. Hollerith’s work contributed to initial programming methods, and punch cards were used to communicate with computers well into the 1970s. We still use the technique of punch cards today in the voting process, and punch cards were subject to media attention with the “hanging chads” issue during the 2000 US presidential elections, when some ballots were not punched properly, making votes difficult to count. Figure 4: A punch card programmed with FORTRAN.3 In the late 1940s, John von Neumann introduced the idea of a computer architecture based on stored programs. The key idea was to store both the data and the program in memory. The idea behind storing programs in a memory was based on the construction of these programs using a small set of generic operations. This became known as von Neumann Architecture in the field of computer science. It was a major advance in computer design, because until this point computers were programmed by setting switches and physically wiring the components. Storing programs in memory completely changed that. This was also the start of machine language (a sequence of 0s and 1s) as a means of programming of the computer. A set of sequences of 0s and 1s were used to indicate the operations and the operands on which these operations would be performed. An example of a machine language program looks something like this: 3 This image is in the public domain. The original can be found here. http://www.saylor.org/courses/cs101/#1.1 The Saylor Foundation Saylor.org Page 3 of 9 Figure 5: An example of a machine language program Each line in the program contains a 16-bit code that represents either a machine instruction or a single data value. For example, the first few bits may indicate that the operation to be performed is addition, and the following bits may provide the numbers that need to be added. Another sequence may have initial bits to indicate that data needs to be fetched from the memory, and the following bits will provide the address in the memory from which the data will be fetched. It was difficult to program using 0s and 1s as different pieces of code looked similar. Giving sections of these 0s and 1s symbolic names would make the task of programming easier as the programmer could focus on data and operations in creating programs. This led to the creation of assembly languages in the 1950s; programmers used these assembly languages to write software. An assembly language is a low-level programming language which is close to machine language but provides clarity into operations of a machine through the use of symbols. An example of a machine language program looks something like this: LD R1, NUMBER1 LD R2, NUMBER2 ADD R3, R1, R2 Figure 6: An assembly language program for adding two numbers The first computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was built by the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory in 1946. It was part of research aimed at providing better ballistic missiles to the U.S. Army during World War II. http://www.saylor.org/courses/cs101/#1.1 The Saylor Foundation Saylor.org Page 4 of 9 Figure 7: ENIAC, the first computer.4 Dr. Presper Eckert and Dr. John Mauchly, two members of the team that built ENIAC, started their own company, Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC, to build the first commercial computer. Their first client was the United States Census Bureau, which needed a computer to keep track of the growing U.S. population. The computer was successfully built in 1951 at the cost of about one million dollars (about $9 million in today’s money). Machine Language and Programming Languages Machines understand 0s and 1s. The task of software is to express computation in a higher-level language and then translate it into a sequence of 0s and 1s that machines can understand. When you express the computation in a higher-level language, this is referred to as raising the level of abstraction in programming context. A typical software application, such as a word processor or an operating system, may include millions of lines of software code. However, the hardware can only execute low-level instructions presented to it in the form of the machine language consisting of 0s and 1s. Several layers of software are needed to convert the high-level application code into the machine language. As shown in the figure below, a system software layer such as the operating system controls the hardware; the user controls application programs, which run on top of the operating system layer. 4 This image is in the public domain. The original can be found here. http://www.saylor.org/courses/cs101/#1.1 The Saylor Foundation Saylor.org Page 5 of 9 Figure 8: A layered structure showing where the operating system software and application software are situated while running on a typical desktop computer.5 Programming Languages During the 1950s and 1960s, several high-level programming languages were introduced, such as FORTRAN, COBOL, Lisp, ALGOL, and PL/I. The 1970s saw the introduction of languages such as Pascal, C, and Prolog. Most of these languages such as Pascal, C, and FORTRAN are procedural programming languages. Procedural programming is also referred to as imperative programming. The basic idea of this programming style is to specify the steps that the program must take to reach the desired state. An exception to this style of programming comes from languages called Lisp and Prolog. Lisp is a functional programming language, and Prolog is a logic programming language. In functional programming style, evaluation of mathematical style functions take place and the state variables are not used. In logic programming, a program is expressed as a sequence of logical assertions and these assertions are automatically evaluated to come up with the result. These languages include a logic evaluation engine along with the compiler. In the late 1970s, a new design approach called object-oriented programming (OOP) was developed.
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