Search for notes by fellow students, in your own course and all over the country.
Browse our notes for titles which look like what you need, you can preview any of the notes via a sample of the contents. After you're happy these are the notes you're after simply pop them into your shopping cart.
Title: A Brief History Of Computers
Description: this notes shows brief history of computers from the starting till date.
Description: this notes shows brief history of computers from the starting till date.
Document Preview
Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above
A Brief History of the Computer
The history of the computer can be divided into six generations each of which was
marked by critical conceptual advances
...
Among the earliest of these was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), German
philosopher and co-founder (with Newton) of the calculus
...
Leibniz actually built a digital calculator and presented it to the scientific authorities
in Paris and London in 1673
...
Inherent in the argument is the principle that binary arithmetic and logic were in some
sense indistinguishable: zeroes and ones could as well be made to represent positive
and negative or true and false
...
The first multi-purpose, i
...
programmable, computing device was probably Charles
Babbage's Difference Engine, which was begun in 1823 but never completed
...
It was designed in 1842, but
unfortunately it also was only partially completed by Babbage
...
By showing that formal logic
could be reduced to an equation whose results could only be zero or one, he made it
possible for binary calculators to function as logic machines (Goldstine 1972)
...
These machines used electronic switches, in the form of vacuum tubes, instead of
electromechanical relays
...
A second early electronic machine was Colossus, designed by Alan Turing for the
British military in 1943
...
Turing's main contribution to the field of
computer science was the idea of the "Turing machine," a mathematical formalism,
indebted to George Boole, concerning computable functions
...
1
The Turing machine held the far-reaching promise that any problem that could be
calculated could be calculated with such an "automaton," and, picking up from
Leibniz, that any proposition that could be expressed logically could, likewise, be
expressed by such an "automaton
...
Presper Eckert and John V
...
The machine wasn't completed until 1945,
but then it was used extensively for calculations during the design of the hydrogen
bomb
...
By recognizing that functions, in the form of a sequence of instructions for a
computer, can be encoded as numbers, the EDVAC group knew the instructions could
be stored in the computer's memory along with numerical data (a "von Neumann
Machine")
...
Von Neumann's own role in the development of the modern digital
computer is profound and complex, having as much to do with brilliant administrative
leadership as with his foundation insight that the instructions for dealing with data,
that is, programming, and the data themselves, were both expressible in binary terms
to the computer, and in that sense indistinguishable one from the other
...
Second Generation Computers (1954--1962)
The second generation saw several important developments at all levels of computer
system design, from the technology used to build the basic circuits to the
programming languages used to write scientific applications
...
During this second generation many high level programming languages were
introduced, including FORTRAN (1956), ALGOL (1958), and COBOL (1959)
...
The latter introduced I/O processors for better throughput between
I/O devices and main memory
...
Innovations in this
era include the use of integrated circuits, or ICs (semiconductor devices with several
transistors built into one physical component), semiconductor memories starting to be
used instead of magnetic cores, microprogramming as a technique for efficiently
designing complex processors, the coming of age of pipelining and other forms of
2
parallel processing, and the introduction of operating systems and time-sharing
...
At this scale entire processors will fit
onto a single chip, and for simple systems the entire computer (processor, main
memory, and I/O controllers) can fit on one chip
...
Two important events marked the early part of the third generation: the development
of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system, both at Bell Labs
...
Fifth Generation Computers (1984--1990)
The development of the next generation of computer systems is characterized mainly
by the acceptance of parallel processing
...
The scale of integration in semiconductors continued at an incredible
pace --- by 1990 it was possible to build chips with a million components --- and
semiconductor memories became standard on all computers
...
One of the most dramatic changes in the sixth generation will be the explosive growth
of wide area networking
...
3
Title: A Brief History Of Computers
Description: this notes shows brief history of computers from the starting till date.
Description: this notes shows brief history of computers from the starting till date.