MGF 1107 class for Tuesday, 10 October 2000.
Since we are meeting in a computerized classroom, I want to use this class period to include some "general education" on the use of the WWWeb (invented by Tim Berners-Lee) as well as covering the use of computers. Further, since you can access this page at any time from your home computer as well as the ones at TCC, there is more information here than we can cover in class. If you find a topic interesting, please explore it further.
Objectives:
Early History:
The history of computing starts with people, and the simple
tools they developed to assist them in doing calculations.
Atanasoff-Berry Computer:
The first electronic computer was built between
1939 and 1942 at Iowa State University.
It is less well known than the ENIAC,
which was built based on Atanasoff's ideas (a point finally
settled in a major court case on computer patents), because
of the publicity about the ENIAC after the war.
The "ABC" did not store its program in memory; that technology
did not appear until 1949.
Colossus:
Colossus was an electronic computer that was designed and
built during 1943 and put to work breaking German
codes (ones more important than the ones created with the
Enigma machine) in January 1944. The very fact that these
codes could be and were broken was considered the Ultra
Secret of World War II and was kept utterly secret until
the classification expired after about 40 years. As a
result, this computer is not mentioned in most histories
of the computer age. There were 10 of these computers
built, but all of it, including the plans, were destroyed
after the war and its existence kept as secret as the fact
that we could read similarly constructed codes used by
other countries. Colossus was big, but not as big as
the ENIAC:
ENIAC:
The ENIAC design started in 1943 at the University of
Pennsylvania and it was constructed there between
1944 and fall 1945 with some parts of
it being put to use as early as mid 1944. It was originally
built to calculate firing tables for howitzers and naval
guns for the Ballistics Research Laboratory, but was also
used for more famous calculations related to nuclear weapons.
Its existence was formally announced in 1946, and a number
of "schools" at Penn spread the design concepts world wide.
The ENIAC was huge:
Manchester Mark 1:
There were several post-war projects to improve on the ENIAC
by storing the program in memory, where it would be more
easily modified. The first to succeed (in 1948) was
a group at Manchester, in Great Britain, that built a
working prototype (called "Baby") of what became the
Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 itself was completed
in 1949. Another computer, the
EDSAC was completed a bit earlier in 1949 at Cambridge,
in England. The EDSAC also ran a program stored in its own
memory, but was not a complete system like the Mark 1.
The Manchester Mark 1 had all of the functional elements of a modern electronic digital computer but looked like a piece of
junk:
Later Developments:
The following are some selected pages from
The Computer Museum History Center hosted at net.org.
I will only use some of these in class.
Other material used here came from the History of Computing Information assembled by Mike Muuss at the US Army Research Lab (successor to the BRL).
