The Comparative Analysis Of The History Of The Computer Science And The Computer Engineering In The USA And Ukraine
The Comparative Analysis Of The History Of The Computer Science And The
Computer Engineering In The USA And Ukraine.
HOWARD H. AIKEN AND THE COMPUTER
Howard Aiken's contributions to the development of the computer -notably
the Harvard Mark I (IBM ASSC) machine, and its successor the Mark II - are
often excluded from the mainstream history of computers on two
technicalities. The first is that Mark I and Mark II were electro-
mechanical rather than electronic; the second one is that Aiken was never
convinced that computer programs should be treated as data in what has come
to be known as the von Neumann concept, or the stored program.
It is not proposed to discuss here the origins and significance of the
stored program. Nor I wish to deal with the related problem of whether the
machines before the stored program were or were not “computers”. This
subject is complicated by the confusion in actual names given to machines.
For example, the ENIAC, which did not incorporate a stored program, was
officially named a computer: Electronic Numeral Integrator And Computer.
But the first stored-program machine to be put into regular operation was
Maurice Wiles' EDSAC: Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator. It
seems to be rather senseless to deny many truly significant innovations (by
H.H.Aiken and by Eckert and Mauchly), which played an important role in the
history of computers, on the arbitrary ground that they did not incorporate
the stored-program concept. Additionally, in the case of Aiken, it is
significant that there is a current computer technology that does not
incorporate the stored programs and that is designated as (at least by
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS®) as “Harvard architecture”, though, it should more
properly be called “Aiken architecture”. In this technology the program is
fix and not subject to any alteration save by intent - as in some computers
used for telephone switching and in ROM.
OPERATION OF THE ENIAC.
Aiken was a visionary, a man ahead of his times. Grace Hopper and others
remember his prediction in the late 1940s, even before the vacuum tube had
been wholly replaced by the transistor, that the time would come when a
machine even more powerful than the giant machines of those days could be
fitted into a space as small as a shoe box.
Some weeks before his death Aiken had made another prediction. He pointed
out that hardware considerations alone did not give a true picture of
computer costs. As hardware has become cheaper, software has been apt to
get more expensive. And then he gave us his final prediction: “The time
will come”, he said, “when manufacturers will gave away hardware in order
to sell software”. Time alone will tell whether or not this was his final
look ahead into the future.
DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTERS IN THE USA
In the early 1960s, when computers were hulking mainframes that took up
entire rooms, engineers were already toying with the then - extravagant
notion of building a computer intended for the sole use of one person. by
the early 1970s, researches at Xerox's Polo Alto Research Center (Xerox
PARC) had realized that the pace of improvement in the technology of
semiconductors - the chips of silicon that are the building blocks of
present-day electronics - meant that sooner or later the PC would be
extravagant no longer. They foresaw that computing power would someday be
so cheap that engineers would be able to afford to devote a great deal of
it simply to making non-technical people more comfortable with these new
information - handling tools. in their labs, they developed or refined much
of what constitutes PCs today, from “mouse” pointing devices to software
“windows”.
Although the work at Xerox PARC was crucial, it was not the spark that took
PCs out of the hands of experts and into the popular imagination. That
happened inauspiciously in January 1975, when the magazine Popular
Electronics put a new kit for hobbyists, called the Altair, on its cover.
for the first time, anybody with $400 and a soldering iron could buy and
assemble his own computer. The Altair inspired Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs
to build the first Apple computer, and a young college dropout named Bill
Gates to write software for it. Meanwhile. the person who deserves the
credit for inventing the Altair, an engineer named Ed Roberts, left the
industry he had spawned to go to medical school. Now he is a doctor in
small town in central Georgia.
To this day, researchers at Xerox and elsewhere pooh-pooh the Altair as too
primitive to have made use of the technology they felt was needed to bring
PCs to the masses. In a sense, they are right. The Altair incorporated one
of the first single-chip microprocessor - a semiconductor chip, that
contained all the basic circuits needed to do calculations - called the
Intel 8080. Although the 8080 was advanced for its time, it was far too
slow to support the mouse, windows, and elaborate software Xerox had
developed. Indeed, it wasn't until 1984, when Apple Computer's Macintosh
burst onto the scene, that PCs were powerful enough to fulfill the original
vision of researchers. “The kind of computing that people are trying to do
today is just what we made at PARC in the early 1970s,” says Alan Kay, a
former Xerox researcher who jumped to Apple in the early 1980s.
MACINTOSH PERFORMA 6200/6300
Researchers today are proceeding in the same spirit that motivated Kay and
his Xerox PARC colleagues in the 1970s: to make information more accessible
to ordinary people. But a look into today's research labs reveals very
little that resembles what we think of now as a PC. For one thing,
researchers seem eager to abandon the keyboard and monitor that are the
PC's trademarks. Instead they are trying to devise PCs with interpretive
powers that are more humanlike - PCs that can hear you and see you, can
tell when you're in a bad mood and know to ask questions when they don't
understand something.
It is impossible to predict the invention that, like the Altair,
crystallize new approaches in a way that captures people's imagination.
Top 20 computer systems
From soldering irons to SparcStations, from MITS to Macintosh, personal
computers have evolved from do-it-yourself kits for electronic hobbyists
into machines that practically leap out of the box and set themselves up.
What enabled them to get from there to here? Innovation and determination.
Here are top 20 systems that made that rapid evolution possible.
MITS Altair 8800
There once was a time when you could buy a top-of-the-line computer for
$395. The only catch was that you had to build it yourself. Although the
Altair 8800 wasn't actually the first personal computer (Scelbi Computer
Consulting`s 8008-based Scelbi-8H kit probably took that honor in 1973), it
grabbed attention. MITS sold 2000 of them in 1975 - more than any single
computer before it.
Based on Intel`s 8-bit 8080 processor, the Altair 8800 kit included 256
bytes of memory (upgradable, of course) and a toggle-switch-and-LED front
panel. For amenities such as keyboard, video terminals, and storage
devices, you had to go to one of the companies that sprang up to support
the Altair with expansion cards. In 1975, MITS offered 4- and 8-KB Altair
versions of BASIC, the first product developed by Bill Gates` and Paul
Allen`s new company, Microsoft.
If the personal computer hobbyists movement was simmering, 1975 saw it come
to a boil with the introduction of the Altair 8800.
Apple II
Those of you who think of the IBM PC as the quintessential business
computers may be in for a surprise: The Apple II (together with VisiCalc)
was what really made people to look at personal computers as business
tools, not just toys.
The Apple II debuted at the first West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco
in 1977. With built-in keyboard, graphics display, eight readily accessible
expansion slots, and BASIC built-into ROM, the Apple II was actually easy
to use. Some of its innovations, like built-in high-resolution color
graphics and a high-level language with graphics commands, are still
extraordinary features in desk top machines.
With a 6502 CPU, 16 KB of RAM, a 16-KB ROM, a cassette interface that never
really worked well (most Apple It ended up with the floppy drive the was
announced in 1978), and color graphics, the Apple II sold for $1298.
Commondore PET
Also introduced at the first West Coast Computer Fair, Commondore`s PET
(Personal Electronic Transactor) started a long line of expensive personal
computers that brought computers to the masses. (The VIC-20 that followed
was the first computer to sell 1 million units, and the Commondore 64 after
that was the first to offer a whopping 64 KB of memory.)
The keyboard and small monochrome display both fit in the same one-piece
unit. Like the Apple II, the PET ran on MOS Technology's 6502. Its $795
price, key to the Pet's popularity supplied only 4 KB of RAM but included a
built-in cassette tape drive for data storage and 8-KB version of Microsoft
BASIC in its 14-KB ROM.
Radio Shack TRS-80
Remember the Trash 80? Sold at local Radio Shack stores in your choice of
color (Mercedes Silver), the TRS-80 was the first ready-to-go computer to
use Zilog`s Z80 processor.
