An Illustrated History of Computers

Part 1
___________________________________
John Kopplin © 2002

The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier
mechanical computers) were given this name because they performed the work that had
previously been assigned to people. "Computer" was originally a job title: it was used to
describe those human beings (predominantly women) whose job it was to perform the
repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigational tables, tide charts,
and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs. Imagine you had a job where hour
after hour, day after day, you were to do nothing but compute multiplications. Boredom
would quickly set in, leading to carelessness, leading to mistakes. And even on your best
days you wouldn't be producing answers very fast. Therefore, inventors have been
searching for hundreds of years for a way to mechanize (that is, find a mechanism that
can perform) this task.

This picture shows what were known as "counting tables" [photo courtesy IBM]
 A typical computer operation back when computers were people.

The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids
the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus operator can work
on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with a hand
calculator (multiplication and division are slower). The abacus is often wrongly attributed
to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians.
The abacus is still in use today, principally in the far east. A modern abacus consists of
rings that slide over rods, but the older one pictured below dates from the time when
pebbles were used for counting (the word "calculus" comes from the Latin word for
pebble).
 A very old abacus

A more modern abacus. Note how the abacus is really just a representation of the human fingers: the
5 lower rings on each rod represent the 5 fingers and the 2 upper rings represent the 2
hands.

In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms,
which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition. The
magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained from a
printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm
values were carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier's Bones.

An original set of Napier's Bones [photo courtesy IBM]

A more modern set of Napier's Bones

Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in
use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs
which landed men on the moon.
 A slide rule

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made drawings of gear-driven calculating machines but

apparently never built any.

A Leonardo da Vinci drawing showing gears arranged for computing

The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the
calculating clock, so named by its inventor, the German professor Wilhelm Schickard in
1623. This device got little publicity because Schickard died soon afterward in the
bubonic plague.

Schickard's Calculating Clock

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was
a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only
add) but couldn't sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really
weren't that accurate (at that time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the required
precision). Up until the present age when car dashboards went digital, the odometer
portion of a car's speedometer used the very same mechanism as the Pascaline to
increment the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel. Pascal was a child
prodigy. At the age of 12, he was discovered doing his version of Euclid's thirty-second
proposition on the kitchen floor. Pascal went on to invent probability theory, the
hydraulic press, and the syringe. Shown below is an 8 digit version of the Pascaline, and
two views of a 6 digit version:

Pascal's Pascaline [photo © 2002 IEEE]

 A 6 digit model for those who couldn't afford the 8 digit model

A Pascaline opened up so you can observe the gears and cylinders which rotated to display the
numerical result
 An Illustrated History of Computers
Part 2
___________________________________
John Kopplin © 2002

Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with
Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because,
instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes arranged around their
circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the
decimal number system (each drum had 10 flutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate use
of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers.
Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone.

Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner (have you ever heard "calculating" referred to as "reckoning"?)

In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its
weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from
punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these
punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the "hanging chad" from the
Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000?).
Jacquard's Loom showing the threads and the punched cards
By selecting particular cards for Jacquard's loom you defined the woven pattern [photo © 2002
IEEE]
A close-up of a Jacquard card
 This tapestry was woven by a Jacquard loom

Jacquard's technology was a real boon to mill owners, but put many loom operators out
of work. Angry mobs smashed Jacquard looms and once attacked Jacquard himself.
History is full of examples of labor unrest following technological innovation yet most
studies show that, overall, technology has actually increased the number of jobs.

By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven
calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine. This
machine would be able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. He
obtained government funding for this project due to the importance of numeric tables in
ocean navigation. By promoting their commercial and military navies, the British
government had managed to become the earth's greatest empire. But in that time frame
the British government was publishing a seven volume set of navigation tables which
came with a companion volume of corrections which showed that the set had over 1000
numerical errors. It was hoped that Babbage's machine could eliminate errors in these
types of tables. But construction of Babbage's Difference Engine proved exceedingly
difficult and the project soon became the most expensive government funded project up
to that point in English history. Ten years later the device was still nowhere near
complete, acrimony abounded between all involved, and funding dried up. The device
was never finished.

A small section of the type of mechanism employed in Babbage's Difference Engine [photo © 2002
IEEE]

Babbage was not deterred, and by then was on to his next brainstorm, which he called the
Analytic Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines, would
be more general purpose in nature because it would be programmable, thanks to the
punched card technology of Jacquard. But it was Babbage who made an important
intellectual leap regarding the punched cards. In the Jacquard loom, the presence or
absence of each hole in the card physically allows a colored thread to pass or stops that
thread (you can see this clearly in the earlier photo). Babbage saw that the pattern of
holes could be used to represent an abstract idea such as a problem statement or the raw
data required for that problem's solution. Babbage saw that there was no requirement that
the problem matter itself physically pass thru the holes.

Furthermore, Babbage realized that punched paper could be employed as a storage

mechanism, holding computed numbers for future reference. Because of the connection
to the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two main parts of his Analytic Engine the
"Store" and the "Mill", as both terms are used in the weaving industry. The Store was
where numbers were held and the Mill was where they were "woven" into new results. In
a modern computer these same parts are called the memory unit and the central
processing unit (CPU).

The Analytic Engine also had a key function that distinguishes computers from
calculators: the conditional statement. A conditional statement allows a program to
achieve different results each time it is run. Based on the conditional statement, the path
of the program (that is, what statements are executed next) can be determined based upon
a condition or situation that is detected at the very moment the program is running.

You have probably observed that a modern stoplight at an intersection between a busy
street and a less busy street will leave the green light on the busy street until a car
approaches on the less busy street. This type of street light is controlled by a computer
program that can sense the approach of cars on the less busy street. That moment when
the light changes from green to red is not fixed in the program but rather varies with each
traffic situation. The conditional statement in the stoplight program would be something
like, "if a car approaches on the less busy street and the more busy street has already
enjoyed the green light for at least a minute then move the green light to the less busy
street". The conditional statement also allows a program to react to the results of its own
calculations. An example would be the program that the I.R.S uses to detect tax fraud.
This program first computes a person's tax liability and then decides whether to alert the
police based upon how that person's tax payments compare to his obligations.

Babbage befriended Ada Byron, the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron (Ada would
later become the Countess Lady Lovelace by marriage). Though she was only 19, she
was fascinated by Babbage's ideas and thru letters and meetings with Babbage she
learned enough about the design of the Analytic Engine to begin fashioning programs for
the still unbuilt machine. While Babbage refused to publish his knowledge for another 30
years, Ada wrote a series of "Notes" wherein she detailed sequences of instructions she
had prepared for the Analytic Engine. The Analytic Engine remained unbuilt (the British
government refused to get involved with this one) but Ada earned her spot in history as
the first computer programmer. Ada invented the subroutine and was the first to
recognize the importance of looping. Babbage himself went on to invent the modern
postal system, cowcatchers on trains, and the ophthalmoscope, which is still used today to
treat the eye.

The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S. Constitution states that a census
should be taken of all U.S. citizens every 10 years in order to determine the
representation of the states in Congress. While the very first census of 1790 had only
required 9 months, by 1880 the U.S. population had grown so much that the count for the
1880 census took 7.5 years. Automation was clearly needed for the next census. The
census bureau offered a prize for an inventor to help with the 1890 census and this prize
was won by Herman Hollerith, who proposed and then successfully adopted Jacquard's
punched cards for the purpose of computation.
Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which
sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's
mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators (a car
speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the results of the count.

An operator working at a Hollerith Desk like the one below

Preparation of punched cards for the U.S. census
 A few Hollerith desks still exist today [photo courtesy The Computer Museum]

The patterns on Jacquard's cards were determined when a tapestry was designed and then
were not changed. Today, we would call this a read-only form of information storage.
Hollerith had the insight to convert punched cards to what is today called a read/write
technology. While riding a train, he observed that the conductor didn't merely punch each
ticket, but rather punched a particular pattern of holes whose positions indicated the
approximate height, weight, eye color, etc. of the ticket owner. This was done to keep
anyone else from picking up a discarded ticket and claiming it was his own (a train ticket
did not lose all value when it was punched because the same ticket was used for each leg
of a trip). Hollerith realized how useful it would be to punch (write) new cards based
upon an analysis (reading) of some other set of cards. Complicated analyses, too involved
to be accomplished during a single pass thru the cards, could be accomplished via
multiple passes thru the cards using newly printed cards to remember the intermediate
results. Unknown to Hollerith, Babbage had proposed this long before.

Hollerith's technique was successful and the 1890 census was completed in only 3 years
at a savings of 5 million dollars. Interesting aside: the reason that a person who removes
inappropriate content from a book or movie is called a censor, as is a person who
conducts a census, is that in Roman society the public official called the "censor" had
both of these jobs.

Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts,
eventually became International Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew
rapidly and punched cards became ubiquitous. Your gas bill would arrive each month
with a punch card you had to return with your payment. This punch card recorded the
particulars of your account: your name, address, gas usage, etc. (I imagine there were
some "hackers" in these days who would alter the punch cards to change their bill). As
another example, when you entered a toll way (a highway that collects a fee from each
driver) you were given a punch card that recorded where you started and then when you
exited from the toll way your fee was computed based upon the miles you drove. When
you voted in an election the ballot you were handed was a punch card. The little pieces of
paper that are punched out of the card are called "chad" and were thrown as confetti at
weddings. Until recently all Social Security and other checks issued by the Federal
government were actually punch cards. The check-out slip inside a library book was a
punch card. Written on all these cards was a phrase as common as "close cover before
striking": "do not fold, spindle, or mutilate". A spindle was an upright spike on the desk
of an accounting clerk. As he completed processing each receipt he would impale it on
this spike. When the spindle was full, he'd run a piece of string through the holes, tie up
the bundle, and ship it off to the archives. You occasionally still see spindles at restaurant
cash registers.

Two types of computer punch cards

Incidentally, the Hollerith census machine was the first machine to ever be featured on a
magazine cover.
 An Illustrated History of Computers
Part 3
___________________________________
 John Kopplin © 2002

IBM continued to develop mechanical calculators for sale to businesses to help with
financial accounting and inventory accounting. One characteristic of both financial
accounting and inventory accounting is that although you need to subtract, you don't need
negative numbers and you really don't have to multiply since multiplication can be
accomplished via repeated addition.

But the U.S. military desired a mechanical calculator more optimized for scientific
computation. By World War II the U.S. had battleships that could lob shells weighing as
much as a small car over distances up to 25 miles. Physicists could write the equations
that described how atmospheric drag, wind, gravity, muzzle velocity, etc. would
determine the trajectory of the shell. But solving such equations was extremely laborious.
This was the work performed by the human computers. Their results would be published
in ballistic "firing tables" published in gunnery manuals. During World War II the U.S.
military scoured the country looking for (generally female) math majors to hire for the
job of computing these tables. But not enough humans could be found to keep up with the
need for new tables. Sometimes artillery pieces had to be delivered to the battlefield
without the necessary firing tables and this meant they were close to useless because they
couldn't be aimed properly. Faced with this situation, the U.S. military was willing to
invest in even hair-brained schemes to automate this type of computation.

One early success was the Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership
between Harvard and IBM in 1944. This was the first programmable digital computer
made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic computer. Instead the Mark I was
constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. The machine weighed 5
tons, incorporated 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51 feet long, and had a 50 ft
rotating shaft running its length, turned by a 5 horsepower electric motor. The Mark I ran
non-stop for 15 years, sounding like a roomful of ladies knitting. To appreciate the scale
of this machine note the four typewriters in the foreground of the following photo.
 The Harvard Mark I: an electro-mechanical computer

You can see the 50 ft rotating shaft in the bottom of the prior photo. This shaft was a
central power source for the entire machine. This design feature was reminiscent of the
days when waterpower was used to run a machine shop and each lathe or other tool was
driven by a belt connected to a single overhead shaft which was turned by an outside
waterwheel.
 A central shaft driven by an outside waterwheel and connected to each machine by overhead belts
was the customary power source for all the machines in a factory

Here's a close-up of one of the Mark I's four paper tape readers. A paper tape was an
improvement over a box of punched cards as anyone who has ever dropped -- and thus
shuffled -- his "stack" knows.

One of the four paper tape readers on the Harvard Mark I (you can observe the punched paper roll
emerging from the bottom)
One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper. Hopper
found the first computer "bug": a dead moth that had gotten into the Mark I and whose
wings were blocking the reading of the holes in the paper tape. The word "bug" had been
used to describe a defect since at least 1889 but Hopper is credited with coining the word
"debugging" to describe the work to eliminate program faults.

The first computer bug [photo © 2002 IEEE]

In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic". This
language eventually became COBOL which was the language most affected by the
infamous Y2K problem. A high-level language is designed to be more understandable by
humans than is the binary language understood by the computing machinery. A high-
level language is worthless without a program -- known as a compiler -- to translate it
into the binary language of the computer and hence Grace Hopper also constructed the
world's first compiler. Grace remained active as a Rear Admiral in the Navy Reserves
until she was 79 (another record).

The Mark I operated on numbers that were 23 digits wide. It could add or subtract two of
these numbers in three-tenths of a second, multiply them in four seconds, and divide them
in ten seconds. Forty-five years later computers could perform an addition in a billionth
of a second! Even though the Mark I had three quarters of a million components, it could
only store 72 numbers! Today, home computers can store 30 million numbers in RAM
and another 10 billion numbers on their hard disk. Today, a number can be pulled from
RAM after a delay of only a few billionths of a second, and from a hard disk after a delay
of only a few thousandths of a second. This kind of speed is obviously impossible for a
machine which must move a rotating shaft and that is why electronic computers killed off
their mechanical predecessors.

On a humorous note, the principal designer of the Mark I, Howard Aiken of Harvard,
estimated in 1947 that six electronic digital computers would be sufficient to satisfy the
computing needs of the entire United States. IBM had commissioned this study to
determine whether it should bother developing this new invention into one of its standard
products (up until then computers were one-of-a-kind items built by special
arrangement). Aiken's prediction wasn't actually so bad as there were very few
institutions (principally, the government and military) that could afford the cost of what
was called a computer in 1947. He just didn't foresee the micro-electronics revolution
which would allow something like an IBM Stretch computer of 1959:

(that's just the operator's console, here's the rest of its 33 foot length:)
to be bested by a home computer of 1976 such as this Apple I which sold for only $600:

The Apple 1 which was sold as a do-it-yourself kit (without the lovely case seen here)

Computers had been incredibly expensive because they required so much hand assembly,
such as the wiring seen in this CDC 7600:
Typical wiring in an early mainframe computer [photo courtesy The Computer Museum]
The microelectronics revolution is what allowed the amount of hand-crafted wiring seen
in the prior photo to be mass-produced as an integrated circuit which is a small sliver of
silicon the size of your thumbnail .

An integrated circuit ("silicon chip") [photo courtesy of IBM]

The primary advantage of an integrated circuit is not that the transistors (switches) are
miniscule (that's the secondary advantage), but rather that millions of transistors can be
created and interconnected in a mass-production process. All the elements on the
integrated circuit are fabricated simultaneously via a small number (maybe 12) of optical
masks that define the geometry of each layer. This speeds up the process of fabricating
the computer -- and hence reduces its cost -- just as Gutenberg's printing press sped up
the fabrication of books and thereby made them affordable to all.

The IBM Stretch computer of 1959 needed its 33 foot length to hold the 150,000
transistors it contained. These transistors were tremendously smaller than the vacuum
tubes they replaced, but they were still individual elements requiring individual assembly.
By the early 1980s this many transistors could be simultaneously fabricated on an
integrated circuit. Today's Pentium 4 microprocessor contains 42,000,000 transistors in
this same thumbnail sized piece of silicon.

It's humorous to remember that in between the Stretch machine (which would be called a
mainframe today) and the Apple I (a desktop computer) there was an entire industry
segment referred to as mini-computers such as the following PDP-12 computer of 1969:
The DEC PDP-12
Sure looks "mini", huh? But we're getting ahead of our story.

One of the earliest attempts to build an all-electronic (that is, no gears, cams, belts, shafts,
etc.) digital computer occurred in 1937 by J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and
mathematics at Iowa State University. By 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford
Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations
with 29 unknowns. This machine was the first to store data as a charge on a capacitor,
which is how today's computers store information in their main memory (DRAM or
dynamic RAM). As far as its inventors were aware, it was also the first to employ binary
arithmetic. However, the machine was not programmable, it lacked a conditional branch,
its design was appropriate for only one type of mathematical problem, and it was not
further pursued after World War II. It's inventors didn't even bother to preserve the
machine and it was dismantled by those who moved into the room where it lay
abandoned.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer [photo © 2002 IEEE]

Another candidate for granddaddy of the modern computer was Colossus, built during
World War II by Britain for the purpose of breaking the cryptographic codes used by
Germany. Britain led the world in designing and building electronic machines dedicated
to code breaking, and was routinely able to read coded Germany radio transmissions. But
Colossus was definitely not a general purpose, reprogrammable machine. Note the
presence of pulleys in the two photos of Colossus below:
 Two views of the code-breaking Colossus of Great Britain

The Harvard Mark I, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, and the British Colossus all made
important contributions. American and British computer pioneers were still arguing over
who was first to do what, when in 1965 the work of the German Konrad Zuse was
published for the first time in English. Scooped! Zuse had built a sequence of general
purpose computers in Nazi Germany. The first, the Z1, was built between 1936 and 1938
in the parlor of his parent's home.
 The Zuse Z1 in its residential setting

Zuse's third machine, the Z3, built in 1941, was probably the first operational, general-
purpose, programmable (that is, software controlled) digital computer. Without
knowledge of any calculating machine inventors since Leibniz (who lived in the 1600's),
Zuse reinvented Babbage's concept of programming and decided on his own to employ
binary representation for numbers (Babbage had advocated decimal). The Z3 was
destroyed by an Allied bombing raid. The Z1 and Z2 met the same fate and the Z4
survived only because Zuse hauled it in a wagon up into the mountains. Zuse's
accomplishments are all the more incredible given the context of the material and
manpower shortages in Germany during World War II. Zuse couldn't even obtain paper
tape so he had to make his own by punching holes in discarded movie film. Because
these machines were unknown outside Germany, they did not influence the path of
computing in America. But their architecture is identical to that still in use today: an
arithmetic unit to do the calculations, a memory for storing numbers, a control system to
supervise operations, and input and output devices to connect to the external world. Zuse
also invented what might be the first high-level computer language, "Plankalkul", though
it too was unknown outside Germany.
 An Illustrated History of Computers
Part 4
___________________________________
John Kopplin © 2002

The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to

ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was
built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John
Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war
department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the
"computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the firing tables for the
army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small piece of
ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off their progress were
some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was astounded that it took all
this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").

ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum
tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC employed paper card readers obtained from IBM (these
were a regular product for IBM, as they were a long established part of business
accounting machines, IBM's forte). When operating, the ENIAC was silent but you knew
it was on as the 18,000 vacuum tubes each generated waste heat like a light bulb and all
this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only be operated in a
specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning system. Only the left
half of ENIAC is visible in the first picture, the right half was basically a mirror image of
what's visible.
Two views of ENIAC: the "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator" (note that it wasn't
even given the name of computer since "computers" were people) [U.S. Army photo]
To reprogram the ENIAC you had to rearrange the patch cords that you can observe on
the left in the prior photo, and the settings of 3000 switches that you can observe on the
right. To program a modern computer, you type out a program with statements like:

Circumference = 3.14 * diameter

To perform this computation on ENIAC you had to rearrange a large number of patch
cords and then locate three particular knobs on that vast wall of knobs and set them to 3,
1, and 4.
 Reprogramming ENIAC involved a hike [U.S. Army photo]

Once the army agreed to fund ENIAC, Mauchly and Eckert worked around the clock,
seven days a week, hoping to complete the machine in time to contribute to the war.
Their war-time effort was so intense that most days they ate all 3 meals in the company
of the army Captain who was their liaison with their military sponsors. They were
allowed a small staff but soon observed that they could hire only the most junior
members of the University of Pennsylvania staff because the more experienced faculty
members knew that their proposed machine would never work.

One of the most obvious problems was that the design would require 18,000 vacuum
tubes to all work simultaneously. Vacuum tubes were so notoriously unreliable that even
twenty years later many neighborhood drug stores provided a "tube tester" that allowed
homeowners to bring in the vacuum tubes from their television sets and determine which
one of the tubes was causing their TV to fail. And television sets only incorporated about
30 vacuum tubes. The device that used the largest number of vacuum tubes was an
electronic organ: it incorporated 160 tubes. The idea that 18,000 tubes could function
together was considered so unlikely that the dominant vacuum tube supplier of the day,
RCA, refused to join the project (but did supply tubes in the interest of "wartime
cooperation"). Eckert solved the tube reliability problem through extremely careful
circuit design. He was so thorough that before he chose the type of wire cabling he would
employ in ENIAC he first ran an experiment where he starved lab rats for a few days and
then gave them samples of all the available types of cable to determine which they least
liked to eat. Here's a look at a small number of the vacuum tubes in ENIAC:
Even with 18,000 vacuum tubes, ENIAC could only hold 20 numbers at a time. However,
thanks to the elimination of moving parts it ran much faster than the Mark I: a
multiplication that required 6 seconds on the Mark I could be performed on ENIAC in 2.8
thousandths of a second. ENIAC's basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second.
Today's home computers employ clock speeds of 1,000,000,000 cycles per second. Built
with $500,000 from the U.S. Army, ENIAC's first task was to compute whether or not it
was possible to build a hydrogen bomb (the atomic bomb was completed during the war
and hence is older than ENIAC). The very first problem run on ENIAC required only 20
seconds and was checked against an answer obtained after forty hours of work with a
mechanical calculator. After chewing on half a million punch cards for six weeks,
ENIAC did humanity no favor when it declared the hydrogen bomb feasible. This first
ENIAC program remains classified even today.

Once ENIAC was finished and proved worthy of the cost of its development, its
designers set about to eliminate the obnoxious fact that reprogramming the computer
required a physical modification of all the patch cords and switches. It took days to
change ENIAC's program. Eckert and Mauchly's next teamed up with the mathematician
John von Neumann to design EDVAC, which pioneered the stored program. Because he
was the first to publish a description of this new computer, von Neumann is often
wrongly credited with the realization that the program (that is, the sequence of
computation steps) could be represented electronically just as the data was. But this major
breakthrough can be found in Eckert's notes long before he ever started working with von
Neumann. Eckert was no slouch: while in high school Eckert had scored the second
highest math SAT score in the entire country.

After ENIAC and EDVAC came other computers with humorous names such as ILLIAC,
JOHNNIAC, and, of course, MANIAC. ILLIAC was built at the University of Illinois at
Champaign-Urbana, which is probably why the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke
chose to have the HAL computer of his famous book "2001: A Space Odyssey" born at
Champaign-Urbana. Have you ever noticed that you can shift each of the letters of IBM
backward by one alphabet position and get HAL?

ILLIAC II built at the University of Illinois (it is a good thing computers were one-of-a-kind
creations in these days, can you imagine being asked to duplicate this?)
HAL from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". Look at the previous picture to understand why the
movie makers in 1968 assumed computers of the future would be things you walk into.

JOHNNIAC was a reference to John von Neumann, who was unquestionably a genius. At
age 6 he could tell jokes in classical Greek. By 8 he was doing calculus. He could recite
books he had read years earlier word for word. He could read a page of the phone
directory and then recite it backwards. On one occasion it took von Neumann only 6
minutes to solve a problem in his head that another professor had spent hours on using a
mechanical calculator. Von Neumann is perhaps most famous (infamous?) as the man
who worked out the complicated method needed to detonate an atomic bomb.

Once the computer's program was represented electronically, modifications to that

program could happen as fast as the computer could compute. In fact, computer programs
could now modify themselves while they ran (such programs are called self-modifying
programs). This introduced a new way for a program to fail: faulty logic in the program
could cause it to damage itself. This is one source of the general protection fault famous
in MS-DOS and the blue screen of death famous in Windows.

Today, one of the most notable characteristics of a computer is the fact that its ability to
be reprogrammed allows it to contribute to a wide variety of endeavors, such as the
following completely unrelated fields:

• the creation of special effects for movies,

• the compression of music to allow more minutes of music to fit within the limited
memory of an MP3 player,
 • the observation of car tire rotation to detect and prevent skids in an anti-lock
braking system (ABS),
• the analysis of the writing style in Shakespeare's work with the goal of proving
whether a single individual really was responsible for all these pieces.

By the end of the 1950's computers were no longer one-of-a-kind hand built devices
owned only by universities and government research labs. Eckert and Mauchly left the
University of Pennsylvania over a dispute about who owned the patents for their
invention. They decided to set up their own company. Their first product was the famous
UNIVAC computer, the first commercial (that is, mass produced) computer. In the 50's,
UNIVAC (a contraction of "Universal Automatic Computer") was the household word
for "computer" just as "Kleenex" is for "tissue". The first UNIVAC was sold,
appropriately enough, to the Census bureau. UNIVAC was also the first computer to
employ magnetic tape. Many people still confuse a picture of a reel-to-reel tape recorder
with a picture of a mainframe computer.
 A reel-to-reel tape drive [photo courtesy of The Computer Museum]

ENIAC was unquestionably the origin of the U.S. commercial computer industry, but its
inventors, Mauchly and Eckert, never achieved fortune from their work and their
company fell into financial problems and was sold at a loss. By 1955 IBM was selling
more computers than UNIVAC and by the 1960's the group of eight companies selling
computers was known as "IBM and the seven dwarfs". IBM grew so dominant that the
federal government pursued anti-trust proceedings against them from 1969 to 1982
(notice the pace of our country's legal system). You might wonder what type of event is
required to dislodge an industry heavyweight. In IBM's case it was their own decision to
hire an unknown but aggressive firm called Microsoft to provide the software for their
personal computer (PC). This lucrative contract allowed Microsoft to grow so dominant
that by the year 2000 their market capitalization (the total value of their stock) was twice
that of IBM and they were convicted in Federal Court of running an illegal monopoly.

If you learned computer programming in the 1970's, you dealt with what today are called
mainframe computers, such as the IBM 7090 (shown below), IBM 360, or IBM 370.

The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe computer [photo courtesy of IBM]

There were 2 ways to interact with a mainframe. The first was called time sharing
because the computer gave each user a tiny sliver of time in a round-robin fashion.
Perhaps 100 users would be simultaneously logged on, each typing on a teletype such as
the following:

The Teletype was the standard mechanism used to interact with a time-sharing computer
A teletype was a motorized typewriter that could transmit your keystrokes to the
mainframe and then print the computer's response on its roll of paper. You typed a single
line of text, hit the carriage return button, and waited for the teletype to begin noisily
printing the computer's response (at a whopping 10 characters per second). On the left-
hand side of the teletype in the prior picture you can observe a paper tape reader and
writer (i.e., puncher). Here's a close-up of paper tape:

Three views of paper tape

After observing the holes in paper tape it is perhaps obvious why all computers use
binary numbers to represent data: a binary bit (that is, one digit of a binary number) can
only have the value of 0 or 1 (just as a decimal digit can only have the value of 0 thru 9).
Something which can only take two states is very easy to manufacture, control, and
sense. In the case of paper tape, the hole has either been punched or it has not. Electro-
mechanical computers such as the Mark I used relays to represent data because a relay
(which is just a motor driven switch) can only be open or closed. The earliest all-
electronic computers used vacuum tubes as switches: they too were either open or closed.
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes because they too could act as switches but were
smaller, cheaper, and consumed less power.

Paper tape has a long history as well. It was first used as an information storage medium
by Sir Charles Wheatstone, who used it to store Morse code that was arriving via the
newly invented telegraph (incidentally, Wheatstone was also the inventor of the
accordion).

The alternative to time sharing was batch mode processing, where the computer gives its
full attention to your program. In exchange for getting the computer's full attention at
run-time, you had to agree to prepare your program off-line on a key punch machine
which generated punch cards.
 An IBM Key Punch machine which operates like a typewriter except it produces punched cards
rather than a printed sheet of paper

University students in the 1970's bought blank cards a linear foot at a time from the
university bookstore. Each card could hold only 1 program statement. To submit your
program to the mainframe, you placed your stack of cards in the hopper of a card reader.
Your program would be run whenever the computer made it that far. You often submitted
your deck and then went to dinner or to bed and came back later hoping to see a
successful printout showing your results. Obviously, a program run in batch mode could
not be interactive.

But things changed fast. By the 1990's a university student would typically own his own
computer and have exclusive use of it in his dorm room.
 The original IBM Personal Computer (PC)

This transformation was a result of the invention of the microprocessor. A

microprocessor (uP) is a computer that is fabricated on an integrated circuit (IC).
Computers had been around for 20 years before the first microprocessor was developed at
Intel in 1971. The micro in the name microprocessor refers to the physical size. Intel
didn't invent the electronic computer. But they were the first to succeed in cramming an
entire computer on a single chip (IC). Intel was started in 1968 and initially produced
only semiconductor memory (Intel invented both the DRAM and the EPROM, two
memory technologies that are still going strong today). In 1969 they were approached by
Busicom, a Japanese manufacturer of high performance calculators (these were
typewriter sized units, the first shirt-pocket sized scientific calculator was the Hewlett-
Packard HP35 introduced in 1972). Busicom wanted Intel to produce 12 custom
calculator chips: one chip dedicated to the keyboard, another chip dedicated to the
display, another for the printer, etc. But integrated circuits were (and are) expensive to
design and this approach would have required Busicom to bear the full expense of
developing 12 new chips since these 12 chips would only be of use to them.
 A typical Busicom desk calculator

But a new Intel employee (Ted Hoff) convinced Busicom to instead accept a general
purpose computer chip which, like all computers, could be reprogrammed for many
different tasks (like controlling a keyboard, a display, a printer, etc.). Intel argued that
since the chip could be reprogrammed for alternative purposes, the cost of developing it
could be spread out over more users and hence would be less expensive to each user. The
general purpose computer is adapted to each new purpose by writing a program which is
a sequence of instructions stored in memory (which happened to be Intel's forte).
Busicom agreed to pay Intel to design a general purpose chip and to get a price break
since it would allow Intel to sell the resulting chip to others. But development of the chip
took longer than expected and Busicom pulled out of the project. Intel knew it had a
winner by that point and gladly refunded all of Busicom's investment just to gain sole
rights to the device which they finished on their own.

Thus became the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor (uP). The 4004 consisted of 2300
transistors and was clocked at 108 kHz (i.e., 108,000 times per second). Compare this to
the 42 million transistors and the 2 GHz clock rate (i.e., 2,000,000,000 times per second)
used in a Pentium 4. One of Intel's 4004 chips still functions aboard the Pioneer 10
spacecraft, which is now the man-made object farthest from the earth. Curiously,
Busicom went bankrupt and never ended up using the ground-breaking microprocessor.

Intel followed the 4004 with the 8008 and 8080. Intel priced the 8080 microprocessor at
$360 dollars as an insult to IBM's famous 360 mainframe which cost millions of dollars.
The 8080 was employed in the MITS Altair computer, which was the world's first
personal computer (PC). It was personal all right: you had to build it yourself from a kit
of parts that arrived in the mail. This kit didn't even include an enclosure and that is the
reason the unit shown below doesn't match the picture on the magazine cover.
 The Altair 8800, the first PC

A Harvard freshman by the name of Bill Gates decided to drop out of college so he could
concentrate all his time writing programs for this computer. This early experienced put
Bill Gates in the right place at the right time once IBM decided to standardize on the Intel
microprocessors for their line of PCs in 1981. The Intel Pentium 4 used in today's PCs is
still compatible with the Intel 8088 used in IBM's first PC.

If you've enjoyed this history of computers, I encourage you to try your own hand at
programming a computer. That is the only way you will really come to understand the
concepts of looping, subroutines, high and low-level languages, bits and bytes, etc. I have
written a number of Windows programs which teach computer programming in a fun,
visually-engaging setting. I start my students on a programmable RPN calculator where
we learn about programs, statements, program and data memory, subroutines, logic and
syntax errors, stacks, etc. Then we move on to an 8051 microprocessor (which happens to
be the most widespread microprocessor on earth) where we learn about microprocessors,
bits and bytes, assembly language, addressing modes, etc. Finally, we graduate to the
most powerful language in use today: C++ (pronounced "C plus plus"). These Windows
programs are accompanied by a book's worth of on-line documentation which serves as a
self-study guide, allowing you to teach yourself computer programming! The home page
(URL) for this collection of software is www.computersciencelab.com.

Bibliography:

"ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer" by Scott
McCartney.