Microcomputer emerges
dad
December 31, 2010
The advent of the microprocessor and solid-state memory made home computing affordable. Early hobby microcomputer systems such as the Altai...
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080
dad
December 28, 2010
Development of the single-chip microprocessor was an enormous catalyst to the popularization of cheap, easy to use, and truly personal compu...
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Mainframes and minicomputers
dad
December 22, 2010
Before the introduction of the microprocessor in the early 1970s, computers were generally large, costly systems owned by large institu...
Monday, December 20, 2010
dad
December 20, 2010
At the other end of the computing spectrum from the microcomputers, the powerful supercomputers of the era also used integrated circuit tech...
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Fourth generation
dad
December 18, 2010
The basis of the fourth generation was the invention of the microprocessor by a team at Intel. Unlike third generation minicomputers, which ...
Friday, December 3, 2010
A typical Busicom desk calculator
dad
December 03, 2010
But a new Intel employee (Ted Hoff) convinced Busicom to instead accept a general purpose computer chip which, like all computers, could be ...
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The original IBM Personal Computer (PC)
dad
December 02, 2010
This transformation was a result of the invention of the microprocessor . A microprocessor (uP) is a computer that is fabricated on an integ...
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
An IBM Key Punch machine which operates like a typewriter except it produces punched cards rather than a printed sheet of paper
dad
November 30, 2010
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 ...
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Three views of paper tape
dad
November 28, 2010
After observing the holes in paper tape it is perhaps obvious why all computers use binary numbers to represent data: a binary bi...
Thursday, November 25, 2010
The Teletype was the standard mechanism used to interact with a time-sharing computer
dad
November 25, 2010
A teletype was a motorized typewriter that could transmit your keystrokes to the mainframe and then print the computer's response on its...
Monday, November 22, 2010
The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe computer [photo courtesy of IBM]
dad
November 22, 2010
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 ...
Thursday, November 11, 2010
A reel-to-reel tape drive [photo courtesy of The Computer Museum]
dad
November 11, 2010
ENIAC was unquestionably the origin of the U.S. commercial computer industry, but its inventors, Mauchly and Eckert, never achieved fortune ...
Sunday, November 7, 2010
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.
dad
November 07, 2010
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 ...
Friday, November 5, 2010
ILLIAC II built at the University of Illinois
dad
November 05, 2010
it is a good thing computers were one-of-a-kind creations in these days, can you imagine being asked to duplicate this
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Reprogramming ENIAC involved a hike (part 2)
dad
November 02, 2010
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 fa...
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Reprogramming ENIAC involved a hike (part 1)
dad
October 31, 2010
(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 t...
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
The Zuse Z1 in its residential setting
dad
October 27, 2010
use's third machine, the Z3 , built in 1941, was probably the first operational, general-purpose, programmable (that is, software contro...
Monday, October 25, 2010
Two views of the code-breaking Colossus of Great Britain
dad
October 25, 2010
The Harvard Mark I, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, and the British Colossus all made important contributions. American and British comp...
Sunday, October 24, 2010
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer
dad
October 24, 2010
Another candidate for granddaddy of the modern computer was Colossus , built during World War II by Britain for the purpose of breaking the...
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The DEC PDP-12
dad
October 23, 2010
Sure looks "mini", huh? But we're getting ahead of our story. One of the earliest attempts to build an all-electronic (that...
Thursday, October 21, 2010
An integrated circuit
dad
October 21, 2010
The primary advantage of an integrated circuit is not that the transistors (switches) are miniscule (that's the secondary advantage), b...
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Typical wiring in an early mainframe computer
dad
June 01, 2010
The microelectronics revolution is what allowed the amount of hand-crafted wiring seen in the prior photo to be mass-produced as an integra...
Friday, May 28, 2010
Computers had been incredibly expensive because they required so much hand assembly, such as the wiring seen in this CDC 7600:
dad
May 28, 2010
Typical wiring in an early mainframe computer [photo courtesy The Computer Museum]
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
To be bested by a home computer of 1976 such as this Apple I which sold for only $600:
dad
May 25, 2010
The Apple 1 which was sold as a do-it-yourself kit (without the lovely case seen here)
Saturday, May 22, 2010
The first computer bug
dad
May 22, 2010
In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic". This language eventually became COBOL which was the lan...
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
dad
May 19, 2010
One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper. Hopper found the first computer "bug": a dead moth that h...
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
dad
May 18, 2010
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 any...
Saturday, May 15, 2010
dad
May 15, 2010
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 de...
Friday, May 14, 2010
dad
May 14, 2010
IBM continued to develop mechanical calculators for sale to businesses to help with financial accounting and inventory accounting. One chara...
Thursday, May 13, 2010
dad
May 13, 2010
Two types of computer punch cards Incidentally, the Hollerith census machine was the first machine to ever be featured on a magazine cover.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
dad
May 12, 2010
The patterns on Jacquard's cards were determined when a tapestry was designed and then were not changed. Today, we would call this a re...
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
dad
May 11, 2010
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 an...
Monday, May 10, 2010
dad
May 10, 2010
Jacquard's technology was a real boon to mill owners, but put many loom operators out of work. Angry mobs smashed Jacquard looms and on...
Sunday, May 9, 2010
dad
May 09, 2010
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 patt...
Saturday, May 8, 2010
dad
May 08, 2010
Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (...
Friday, May 7, 2010
Schickard's Calculating Clock
dad
May 07, 2010
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-dr...
A Leonardo da Vinci drawing showing gears arranged for computing
dad
May 07, 2010
The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the calculating clock , so named by its inventor, the German pro...
Thursday, May 6, 2010
A slide rule
dad
May 06, 2010
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made drawings of gear-driven calculating machines but apparently never built any.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
dad
May 05, 2010
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 engine...
dad
May 05, 2010
In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be ...
The abacus
dad
May 05, 2010
The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids the memory of the human performing the calculation...
dad
May 05, 2010
The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers) were given this name because they perf...
