THE HISTORY of COMPUTERS Teacher’S Guide INTRODUCTION This Teacher’S Guide Provides Information to Help You Get the Most out of the History of Computers
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May 21St at the Time, the EDSAC Used IBM 726 Three Small Cathode Ray Tube Börje Langefors Screens to Display the State of Its Announced Memory
it played tic-tac-toe (known as Noughts and Crosses in the UK). May 21st At the time, the EDSAC used IBM 726 three small cathode ray tube Börje Langefors screens to display the state of its Announced memory. Each one could draw a May 21, 1952 Born: May 21, 1915; grid of 35 x 16 dots. Douglas re- purposed one of them for his Ystad, Sweden The IBM 726 was the company’s game, and obtained input (i.e. Died: Dec. 13, 2009 first magnetic tape unit, where to place a nought or intended for use with the Langefors developed the cross) via EDSAC’s rotary recently announced IBM 701 ‘infological equation’ in 1980, controller. [April 7], the company’s first which describes the difference electronic computer. between information and data in terms of additional semantic The 726 utilized half-inch tapes background and a with seven tracks. Six were for communication time interval. the data and the seventh was employed as a parity track. Langefors joined SAAB, the Some tapes were 1,200 feet long, Swedish aerospace and defense could store 2.3 MB of data, and company, in 1949 where he IBM claimed that just one could utilized analog devices for replace 12,500 punch cards. calculating wing stresses. The need for more powerful tools The drive could write 100 became evident, and the only characters per inch on a tape Swedish computer of the time, EDSAC CRT Tubes. Computer and read 75 inches per second. the BESK [April 1], was Lab, Univ. of Cambridge. CC BY To withstand the system’s fast insufficient for the task. -
An Early Program Proof by Alan Turing F
An Early Program Proof by Alan Turing F. L. MORRIS AND C. B. JONES The paper reproduces, with typographical corrections and comments, a 7 949 paper by Alan Turing that foreshadows much subsequent work in program proving. Categories and Subject Descriptors: 0.2.4 [Software Engineeringj- correctness proofs; F.3.1 [Logics and Meanings of Programs]-assertions; K.2 [History of Computing]-software General Terms: Verification Additional Key Words and Phrases: A. M. Turing Introduction The standard references for work on program proofs b) have been omitted in the commentary, and ten attribute the early statement of direction to John other identifiers are written incorrectly. It would ap- McCarthy (e.g., McCarthy 1963); the first workable pear to be worth correcting these errors and com- methods to Peter Naur (1966) and Robert Floyd menting on the proof from the viewpoint of subse- (1967); and the provision of more formal systems to quent work on program proofs. C. A. R. Hoare (1969) and Edsger Dijkstra (1976). The Turing delivered this paper in June 1949, at the early papers of some of the computing pioneers, how- inaugural conference of the EDSAC, the computer at ever, show an awareness of the need for proofs of Cambridge University built under the direction of program correctness and even present workable meth- Maurice V. Wilkes. Turing had been writing programs ods (e.g., Goldstine and von Neumann 1947; Turing for an electronic computer since the end of 1945-at 1949). first for the proposed ACE, the computer project at the The 1949 paper by Alan M. -
Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine
5 Turing and the computer B. Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot The Turing machine In his first major publication, ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ (1936), Turing introduced his abstract Turing machines.1 (Turing referred to these simply as ‘computing machines’— the American logician Alonzo Church dubbed them ‘Turing machines’.2) ‘On Computable Numbers’ pioneered the idea essential to the modern computer—the concept of controlling a computing machine’s operations by means of a program of coded instructions stored in the machine’s memory. This work had a profound influence on the development in the 1940s of the electronic stored-program digital computer—an influence often neglected or denied by historians of the computer. A Turing machine is an abstract conceptual model. It consists of a scanner and a limitless memory-tape. The tape is divided into squares, each of which may be blank or may bear a single symbol (‘0’or‘1’, for example, or some other symbol taken from a finite alphabet). The scanner moves back and forth through the memory, examining one square at a time (the ‘scanned square’). It reads the symbols on the tape and writes further symbols. The tape is both the memory and the vehicle for input and output. The tape may also contain a program of instructions. (Although the tape itself is limitless—Turing’s aim was to show that there are tasks that Turing machines cannot perform, even given unlimited working memory and unlimited time—any input inscribed on the tape must consist of a finite number of symbols.) A Turing machine has a small repertoire of basic operations: move left one square, move right one square, print, and change state. -
History of ENIAC
A Short History of the Second American Revolution by Dilys Winegrad and Atsushi Akera (1) Today, the northeast corner of the old Moore School building at the University of Pennsylvania houses a bank of advanced computing workstations maintained by the professional staff of the Computing and Educational Technology Service of Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science. There, fifty years ago, in a larger room with drab- colored walls and open rafters, stood the first general purpose electronic computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, or ENIAC. It spanned 150 feet in width with twenty banks of flashing lights indicating the results of its computations. ENIAC could add 5,000 numbers or do fourteen 10-digit multiplications in a second-- dead slow by present-day standards, but fast compared with the same task performed on a hand calculator. The fastest mechanical relay computers being operated experimentally at Harvard, Bell Laboratories, and elsewhere could do no more than 15 to 50 additions per second, a full two orders of magnitude slower. By showing that electronic computing circuitry could actually work, ENIAC paved the way for the modern computing industry that stands as its great legacy. ENIAC was by no means the first computer. In 1839, an Englishman Charles Babbage designed and developed the first true mechanical digital computer, which he described as a "difference engine," for solving mathematical problems including simple differential equations. He was assisted in his work by a woman mathematician, Ada Countess Lovelace, a member of the aristocracy and the daughter of Lord Byron. They worked out the mathematics of mechanical computation, which, in turn, led Babbage to design the more ambitious analytical engine. -
The Manchester University "Baby" Computer and Its Derivatives, 1948 – 1951”
Expert Report on Proposed Milestone “The Manchester University "Baby" Computer and its Derivatives, 1948 – 1951” Thomas Haigh. University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee & Siegen University March 10, 2021 Version of citation being responded to: The Manchester University "Baby" Computer and its Derivatives, 1948 - 1951 At this site on 21 June 1948 the “Baby” became the first computer to execute a program stored in addressable read-write electronic memory. “Baby” validated the widely used Williams- Kilburn Tube random-access memories and led to the 1949 Manchester Mark I which pioneered index registers. In February 1951, Ferranti Ltd's commercial Mark I became the first electronic computer marketed as a standard product ever delivered to a customer. 1: Evaluation of Citation The final wording is the result of several rounds of back and forth exchange of proposed drafts with the proposers, mediated by Brian Berg. During this process the citation text became, from my viewpoint at least, far more precise and historically reliable. The current version identifies several distinct contributions made by three related machines: the 1948 “Baby” (known officially as the Small Scale Experimental Machine or SSEM), a minimal prototype computer which ran test programs to prove the viability of the Manchester Mark 1, a full‐scale computer completed in 1949 that was fully designed and approved only after the success of the “Baby” and in turn served as a prototype of the Ferranti Mark 1, a commercial refinement of the Manchester Mark 1 of which I believe 9 copies were sold. The 1951 date refers to the delivery of the first of these, to Manchester University as a replacement for its home‐built Mark 1. -
A Large Routine
A large routine Freek Wiedijk It is not widely known, but already in June 1949∗ Alan Turing had the main concepts that still are the basis for the best approach to program verification known today (and for which Tony Hoare developed a logic in 1969). In his three page paper Checking a large routine, Turing describes how to verify the correctness of a program that calculates the factorial function by repeated additions. He both shows how to use invariants to establish the correctness of this program, as well as how to use a variant to establish termination. In the paper the program is only presented as a flow chart. A modern C rendering is: int fac (int n) { int s, r, u, v; for (u = r = 1; v = u, r < n; r++) for (s = 1; u += v, s++ < r; ) ; return u; } Turing's paper seems not to have been properly appreciated at the time. At the EDSAC conference where Turing presented the paper, Douglas Hartree criticized that the correctness proof sketched by Turing should not be called inductive. From a modern point of view this is clearly absurd. Marc Schoolderman first told me about this paper (and in his master's thesis used the modern Why3 tool of Jean-Christophe Filli^atreto make Turing's paper fully precise; he also wrote the above C version of Turing's program). He then challenged me to speculate what specific computer Turing had in mind in the paper, and what the actual program for that computer might have been. My answer is that the `EPICAC'y of this paper probably was the Manchester Mark 1. -
Alan Turing's Other Universal Machine
viewpoints VDOI:10.1145/2209249.2209277 Martin Campbell-Kelly Historical Reflections Alan Turing’s Other Universal Machine Reflections on the Turing ACE computer and its influence. LL COMPUTER SCIENTISTS know about the Univer- sal Turing Machine, the theoretical construct the British genius Alan Turing Adescribed in his famous 1936 paper on the Entscheidungsproblem (the halting problem). The Turing Machine is one of the foundation stones of theoreti- cal computer science. Much less well known is the practical stored program computer he proposed after the war in February 1946. The computer was called the ACE—Automatic Comput- ing Engine—a name intended to evoke the spirit of Charles Babbage, the pio- neer of computing machines in the previous century. Almost all post-war electronic com- puters were, and still are, based on the famous EDVAC Report written by John von Neumann in June 1945 on behalf The Pilot ACE, May 1950. Jim Wilkinson (center right) and Donald Davies (right). of the computer group at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the roles. Computers were in the air and of one, and over the next few months University of Pennsylvania. Von Neu- universities at Manchester, Cam- he evolved the design of the ACE. His mann was very familiar with Turing’s bridge, and elsewhere established report was formally presented to the 1936 Entscheidungsproblem paper. In electronic computer projects. Out- NPL’s executive committee in Febru- 1937, Turing was a research assistant side the academic sphere, in Lon- ary 1946. at the Institute for Advanced Study at don, the National Physical Laboratory Although the ACE drew heavily on Princeton University, where von Neu- (NPL—Britain’s equivalent of the Na- the EDVAC Report, it had many novel mann was a professor of mathematics. -
Computer Hardware
Computer Hardware MJ Rutter mjr19@cam Michaelmas 2017 Typeset by FoilTEX c 2016 MJ Rutter Contents History 4 The CPU 12 instructions ....................................... ............................................. 18 pipelines .......................................... ........................................... 19 vectorcomputers.................................... .............................................. 38 performancemeasures . ............................................... 39 Memory 44 DRAM .................................................. .................................... 45 caches............................................. .......................................... 57 Memory Access Patterns in Practice 86 matrixmultiplication. ................................................. 86 matrixtransposition . ................................................110 Memory Management 120 virtualaddressing .................................. ...............................................121 pagingtodisk ....................................... ............................................130 memorysegments ..................................... ............................................139 Compilers & Optimisation 160 optimisation....................................... .............................................161 thepitfallsofF90 ................................... ..............................................185 I/O, Libraries, Disks & Fileservers 198 librariesandkernels . ................................................198 -