History Of Compuers Essay Research Paper Modern

History Of Compuers Essay, Research Paper

Modern computing can probably be traced back to the ‘Harvard Mk I’ and Colossus (both of 1943). Colossus was an electronic computer built in Britain at the end 1943 and designed to crack the German coding system – Lorenz cipher. The ‘Harvard Mk I’ was a more general purpose electro-mechanical programmable computer built at Harvard University with backing from IBM. These computers were among the first of the ‘first generation’ computers.

First generation computers were normally based around wired circuits containing vacuum valves and used punched cards as the main (non-volatile) storage medium. Another general purpose computer of this era was ‘ENIAC’ (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) which was completed in 1946. It was typical of first generation computers, it weighed 30 tonnes contained 18,000 electronic valves and consumed around 25KW of electrical power. It was, however, capable of an amazing 100,000 calculations a second.

The next major step in the history of computing was the invention of the transistor in 1947. This replaced the inefficient valves with a much smaller and more reliable component. Transistorised computers are normally referred to as ‘Second Generation’ and dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite using transistors and printed circuits these computers were still bulky and strictly the domain of Universities and governments.

The explosion in the use of computers began with ‘Third Generation’ computers. These relied Jack St. Claire Kilby’s invention – the integrated circuit or microchip; the first integrated circuit was produced in September 1958 but computers using them didn’t begin to appear until 1963. While large ‘mainframes’ such as the I.B.M. 360 increased storage and processing capabilities further, the integrated circuit allowed the development of Minicomputers that began to bring computing into many smaller businesses. On November 15, 1971, Intel released the world’s first microprocessor, the 4004 – and a technology on which the fourth generation of computers are based. The microprocessor locates much of the computers processing abilities on a single (small) chip. Coupled with another of Intel’s inventions – the RAM chip (Kilobits of memory on a single chip) – the microprocessor allowed fourth generation computers to be even smaller and faster than ever before. The 4004 was capable of 60,000 instructions per second, but later processors (such as the 8086 that all of Intel’s processors for the IBM PC and compatibles is based) brought ever increasing speed and power to the computers. Supercomputers of the era were immensely powerful, like the Cray-1 which could calculate 150 million floating point operations per second. The microprocessor allowed the development of microcomputers, personal computers that were small and cheap enough to be available to ordinary people. The first such personal computer was the MITS Altair 8800, released at the end of 1974, but it was followed by computers such as the Apple I & II, Commodore PET and eventually the original IBM PC in 1981.

Although processing power and storage capacities have increased beyond all recognition since 1972 the underlying technology of LSI (large scale integration) or VLSI (very large scale integration) microchips has remained basically the same, so it is widely regarded that most of today’s computers still belong to the fourth generation.

History of the Internet

The internet’s history can be traced back to ARPANET – which was started by the US Dept. of Defence for research into networking sometime in 1969.

Many people wanted to put their ideas into the standards for communication between the computers that made up this network, so a system was devised for putting forward ideas. Basically you wrote your ideas in a paper called a ‘Request for Comments’ (RFC for short), and let everyone else read it. People commented on and improved your ideas in new RFCs. The first RFC (RFC0001) was written on April 7th, 1969 – that this is probably the closest thing to a ’start date’ for the internet. There are now well over 2000 RFCs, describing every aspect of how the internet functions.

ARPAnet was opened to non-military users later in the 1970s, and early takers were the big universities – although at this stage it resembled nothing like the internet we know today. International connections (i.e. outside America) started in 1972, but the internet was still just a way for computers to talk to each other and for research into networking, there was no World-Wide-Web and no email as we now know it.

It wasn’t until the early to mid 1980s that the services we use most now started appearing on the internet. The concept of ‘domain names’, things like ‘www.microsoft.com’ (Microsoft’s web server), wasn’t even introduced until 1984 – before that all the computers were just addressed by their IP addresses (numbers). Most protocols for email and other services appeared after this.

The part of the internet most people are probably most familiar with is the World-Wide-Web. This is a collection of hyperlinked pages of information distributed over the internet via a network protocol called HTTP (hyper-text-transfer-protocol). This was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. He was a physicist working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, and wanted a way for