What is evolution of Computer History
History of Computer
Considering the history of social development, Marxists argue that "history is nothing but a successive change of individual generations." Obviously, this is true for the history of computers. Here are some definitions of the term "computer generation", taken from 2 sources. "Generations of computers are the recent breakdown of computers into classes defined by the element base and performance." Generations of computers - a weak classification of computing systems according to the degree of development of hardware and, more recently, "software." (Explanatory Dictionary of Computing Systems: Translated from English. M.: Mechanical Engineering, 1990). The assertion of the concept of computers belonging to one generation or another and the appearance of the term “generation” dates back to 1964, when IBM released a series of IBM / 360 computers on hybrid circuits (monolithic integrated circuits were not yet available in sufficient quantities at that time), calling this series is third generation computers. Accordingly, previous computers - on transistors and electronic tubes - are computers of the second and third generations. Subsequently, this classification, which came into use, was expanded and computers of the fourth and fifth generations appeared.
To understand the history of computer technology, the introduced classification had at least two aspects: first, all activities related to computers were considered a prehistory before the creation of ENIAC computers; the second - the development of computer technology was determined directly in terms of hardware technology and circuits.
The second aspect is confirmed by the chief designer of DEC and one of the inventors of mini-computers G. Bell, saying that "the history of the computer industry almost always moved technology."
Turning to the assessment and consideration of various generations, it is necessary first of all to note that since the process of creating computers has been and is ongoing (many developers from many countries are involved in it, dealing with solving various problems), it is difficult, and in some cases useless, trying establish exactly when a particular generation began or ended.
In 1883, Thomas Alva Edison, trying to extend the life of a lamp with a carbon thread, introduced a platinum electrode and a positive voltage into her vacuum cylinder, then a current flows between the electrode and the thread in vacuum. Finding no explanation for such an unusual phenomenon, Edison limited himself to describing it in detail, just in case he took a patent and sent the lamp to the Philadelphia exhibition. About her in December 1884 in the journal "Engineering" was a note "Apparition in the bulb of Edison."
The American inventor did not recognize the discovery of exceptional importance (in fact, this was his only fundamental discovery - thermionic emission). He did not understand that his incandescent lamp with a platinum electrode was essentially the world's first electronic lamp. The first to come up with the idea of the practical use of the "Edison effect" was the English physicist J. A. Fleming (1849 - 1945). Working since 1882 as a consultant to the Edison company in London, he learned about the "appearance" firsthand - from Edison himself. Flaming created his diode - a two-electrode lamp in 1904.
In October 1906, the American engineer Lee de Forest invented an electronic lamp - an amplifier, or audio, as he then called it, which had a third electrode - a grid. He introduced the principle on the basis of which all further electron tubes were built - control of the current flowing between the anode and cathode using other auxiliary elements.
In 1910, German engineers Lieben, Raines and Strauss constructed a triode, the grid of which was made in the form of a perforated aluminum sheet and placed in the center of the cylinder, and in order to increase the emission current, they proposed covering the filament with a layer of barium oxide or calcium. In 1911, the American physicist C. D. Coolidge proposed the use of thorium oxide — an oxide cathode — as a coating for a tungsten filament, and he obtained a tungsten wire that revolutionized the lamp industry. In 1915, the American physicist Irving Langmuir designed a two-electron lamp - a kenotron, which is used as a rectifier lamp in power sources. In 1916, the lamp industry began to produce a special type of lamp design - water-cooled generator lamps.
The idea of a lamp with two hundredths - a tetrode was expressed in 1919 by the German physicist Walter Schottky and independently of it in 1923 by the American E.W. Hall, and this idea was realized by the Englishman H.J. Round in the second half of the 20s .g. In 1929, Dutch scientists G. Holst and B. Tellegen created an electronic lamp with 3 grids - a pentode. A heptode was created in 1932, hexode and pentagride in 1933, lamps in metal cases appeared in 1935. Further development of electronic lamps went along the path of improving their functional characteristics, along the path of multifunctional use. Projects and implementation of Mark-1, EDSAC and EDVAC machines in England and the USA, MESM in the USSR laid the foundation for the development of vacuum tube technology computers - first-generation serial computers.
The development of the first electronic serial machine UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) began around 1947 by Eckert and Mauchli, who founded ECKERT-MAUCHLI in December of that year. The first model of the machine (UNIVAC-1) was built for the US Census Bureau and put into operation in the spring of 1951. The synchronous, sequential computer UNIVAC-1 was created on the basis of ENIAC and EDVAC computers. She worked with a clock frequency of 2.25 MHz and contained about 5000 electronic tubes. An internal storage device with a capacity of 1000 12-bit decimal numbers was performed on 100 mercury delay lines. Shortly after the commissioning of the UNVIAC - 1 machine, its developers came up with the idea of automatic programming. It came down to the fact that the machine itself could prepare the sequence of commands that is needed to solve this problem. The fifties are the heyday of computer technology, the years of significant achievements and innovations both in architectural and in scientific - technical terms. Distinctive features in the architecture of modern computers in comparison with Neumann architecture first appeared in first-generation computers.
A strong deterrent to the work of computer designers in the early 50s. there was a lack of high-speed memory. According to one of the pioneers of computer technology - D. Eckert, "the architecture of a machine is determined by memory." Researchers have focused on the storage properties of ferrite rings strung on wire matrices. In 1951, J. Forrester published an article on the use of magnetic cores for storing digital information in Volume 22 of the Journal of Applid Phisics. In the Whirlwind - 1 machine, a magnet memory was first used. It consisted of 2 cubes with 323217 cores, which provided storage of 2048 words for 16 - bit binary numbers with one bit of parity control.
IBM has been involved in the development of electronic computers. In 1952, she released her first industrial electronic computer, the IBM 701, which was a parallel-acting synchronous computer containing 4,000 electronic tubes and 12,000 germanium diodes. An improved version of the IBM 704 machine was characterized by a high speed of operation, it used index registers and the data was presented in the form of a floating point. After the IBM 704 computer, the IBM 709 was released, which in architectural terms was close to the second and third generation machines. For the first time, indirect addressing was used in this machine, and input / output channels appeared for the first time. In 1956, IBM developed floating magnetic air cushion heads. Their invention made it possible to create a new type of memory - disk memory, the significance of which was fully appreciated in the following decades of the development of computer technology. The first disk drives appeared in the IBM 305 and RAMAC machines. The latter had a package consisting of 50 magnetically coated metal disks that rotated at a speed of 12,000 rpm. On the surface of the disc there were 100 tracks for recording data, 10,000 characters each. Following the first serial computer UNIVAC - 1, Remington - Rand in 1952 released the UNIVAC - 1103 computer, which ran 50 times faster. Later in the UNIVAC - 1103 computer, software interrupts were first applied. Employees at Remington-Rand used an algebraic form for writing algorithms called "Short Cocle" (the first interpreter created in 1949 by John Mauchley). In addition, it should be noted an officer of the US Navy and the head of a group of programmers, while Captain (later the only woman in the Navy admiral) Grace Hopper, who developed the first program, A-O compiler (By the way, the term "compiler" was first introduced by G. Hopper in 1951). This compiling program translated into the machine language of the entire program, written in an algebraic form convenient for processing.
IBM also took the first steps in the field of programming automation, creating in 1953 for the machine IBM 701 "Fast coding system." In our country, A. A. Lyapunov proposed one of the first programming languages. In 1957, a group led by D. Backus completed work on the subsequently become the first popular high-level programming language, called FORTRAN. The language, first implemented on an IBM 704 computer, helped expand the scope of computers.
In the UK in July 1951, at a conference at the University of Manchester, M. Wilkes presented the report "The Best Method for Designing an Automatic Machine," which pioneered the basics of microprogramming. His method of designing control devices has found wide application. M. Wilks realized his idea of microprogramming in 1957 when creating the EDSAC-2 machine. In 1951, M. Wilks, together with D. Wheeler and S. Gill, wrote the first programming textbook "Programming for Electronic Computing Machines" (Russian translation of 1953).
In 1951, the company Ferranti began serial production of the Mark-1 machine. And after 5 years, the Ferranti company released the Pegasus computer, in which the concept of general purpose registers (RON) was first embodied. With the advent of RON, the distinction between index registers and batteries was eliminated, and the programmer had not one but several registers - batteries.
In our country in 1948, the problems of the development of computer technology became a national task. Work has begun on the creation of serial computers of the first generation. In 1950, the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering (ITM and VT) organized a department of digital computers for the development and creation of large computers. In 1951, the BESM machine (Big Electronic Calculating Machine) was designed here, and in 1952 its pilot operation began.
The project initially intended to use memory on Williams tubes, but until 1955 mercury delay lines were used as memory elements in it. At that time, BESM was a very productive machine - 800 op / s. It had a three-address system of commands, and to simplify programming, the standard program method was widely used, which later laid the foundation for modular programming, application packages. The machine began to be mass-produced in 1956 under the name BESM - 2.
In the same period in the KB, led by M. A. Lesechko, began designing another computer, called the "Arrow". Master the mass production of this machine was entrusted to the Moscow factory CAM. The chief designer was Yu. A. Bazilevsky, and one of his assistants was B. I. Rameev, later the designer of the Ural series. The problems of mass production predetermined some features of Strela: low speed compared to BESM, spacious installation, etc. In the machine, 45-track magnetic tapes were used as external memory, and RAM was used on Williams tubes. "Arrow" had a large capacity and convenient command system.
The first Strela computer was installed at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the Mathematical Institute of the Academy of Sciences (MIAN), and at the end of 1953 its serial production began. In 1951, in the laboratory of electrical circuits of the Power Engineering Institute under the direction of I.S. Brook, a prototype of a small computer of the first generation under the name M-1 was built.
The following year, the M-2 computer was created here, which marked the beginning of the creation of economical middle-class machines. One of the leading developers of this machine was M. A. Kartsev, who subsequently made a great contribution to the development of domestic computer technology. The M-2 used 1879 lamps, less than the Strela, and the average productivity was 2000 op / s. Three types of memory were involved: electrostatic on 34 Williams tubes, on a magnetic drum and on magnetic tape using the usual MAG-8 tape recorder for that time.
In 1955 - 1956 the laboratory team released a small computer M-3 with a speed of 30 op / s and RAM on a magnetic drum. The peculiarity of the M-3 was that the asynchronous principle of operation was used for the central control device. It should be noted that in 1956 the team of I. S. Brook stood out from the Energy Institute and formed the Laboratory of Control Machines and Systems, which later became the Institute of Electronic Control Machines (INEUM). Another development of a small computing machine called "Ural" was completed in 1954 by a team of employees led by Rameev .. This machine became the ancestor of a whole family of "Urals", the last series of which ("Ural -16"), was released in 1967 The simplicity of the machine, successful design, low cost led to its widespread use. In 1955, the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences was created, designed to conduct scientific work in the field of machine mathematics and to provide open computing services to other organizations of the Academy.
In the second half of the 50s in our country another 8 types of machines were produced using vacuum-tube technology. Of these, the most successful was the M-20 computer, created under the leadership of S. A. Lebedev, who in 1954 headed ITM and VT. The machine was distinguished by high productivity (20 thousand op / s), which was achieved using the perfect elemental base and the corresponding functional and structural organization. As noted by A. I. Ershov and M. R. Shura-Bura, "this solid foundation laid great responsibility on the developers, since the machine, and more precisely its architecture, was to be embodied in several large series (M-20, BESM-3M, BESM-4, M-220, M-222). " Serial production of the M-20 computer was launched in 1959. In 1958, under the leadership of V. M. Glushkov (1923 - 1982), the Kiev computer was created at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, with a productivity of 6-10 thousand /with. Computer "Kiev" for the first time in our country was used for remote control of technological processes.
At the same time, in Minsk, under the leadership of G.P. Lopato and V.V. Przhiyalkovsky, work began on the creation of the first machine of the subsequently known Minsk-1 family. It was produced by the Minsk factory of computing machines in various modifications: Minsk-1, Minsk-11, Minsk-12, Minsk-14. The machine was widely used in computer centers in our country. The average productivity of the machine was 2 - 3 thousand op / s.
When considering the technology of first-generation computers, it is especially necessary to dwell on one of the input / output devices. From the beginning of the appearance of the first computers, a contradiction was revealed between the high speed of central devices and the low speed of external devices. In addition, the imperfection and inconvenience of these devices was revealed. The first data carrier in computers, as you know, was a punch card. Then came punching paper tapes or just punched tapes. They came from telegraph technology after the beginning of the 19th century. father and son from Chicago, Charles and Howard Krama invented teletype. Punched tapes began to replace punched cards in tabs, and then in the first computers - in the relay machines of D. Shtibits and G. Aiken, in the English Colossus machines from Bletchi-Park and others. The first innovations in input-output systems were noted in the Whirlwind machine -one".
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