Introduction To Computers

The modern era of digital computers began in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the United States, Britain, and Germany. Their programs were stored on punched paper tape or cards, and they had limited internal data storage. For historical developments, see the section Invention of the modern computer.

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Palm Inc., founded by Ed Colligan, Donna Dubinsky, and Jeff Hawkins, originally created software for the Casio Zoomer personal data assistant. The first generation of Palm-produced devices, the Palm 1000 and 5000, are based around a Motorola microprocessor running at 16MHz, and uses a special gestural input language called “Graffiti,” which is quick to learn and fast. Palm could be connected to a PC or Mac using a serial port to synchronize – “sync” – both computer and Palm. The company called it a ‘connected organizer’ rather than a PDA to emphasize this ability. Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corporation moves artificial intelligence a step forward when he develops the controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine CM-1. The machine used up to 65,536 one-bit processors and could complete several billion operations per second.

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Even after computers were commercialized around the 1950s, most computers were “hosted” in highly secured data processing centers, and users accessed the host computers through “dumb” terminals. By the late 1960s, IBM became a dominant vendor of large-scale computers called a “mainframe” host. In the mid-1970s, minicomputers started challenging mainframe computers. In many cases, minicomputers could host applications and perform the same functions as mainframes, but with less cost.

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It used $120 worth of electronics components, as outlined in the September 1973 issue of hobbyist magazine Radio Electronics. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store 512 characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the 1990s. Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar!

The IAS computer was designed for scientific calculations and it performed essential work for the US atomic weapons program. Popular modern programming languages, such as JavaScript and Python, work through multiple forms of programming paradigms. Functional programming, which uses mathematical functions to give outputs based on data input, is one of the more common ways code is used to provide instructions for a computer. Cloud computing is a technology largely viewed as the next big step in the development and deployment of an increasing number of distributed applications. The companies promoting cloud computing seem to have learned the most important lessons from the grid movement.

Typically, computer users of the time fed their programs into a computer using punched cards or paper tape. Ross contended that a Flexowriter -- an electrically-controlled typewriter -- connected to an MIT computer could function as a keyboard input device due to its low cost and flexibility. An experiment conducted five months later on the MIT Whirlwind computer confirmed how useful and convenient a keyboard input device could be. IBM establishes the 650 as its first mass-produced computer, with the company selling 450 in just one year. Spinning at 12,500 rpm, the 650´s magnetic data-storage drum allowed much faster access to stored information than other drum-based machines.

It was natural for some of this work to move into the UI field for computing devices. It’s perhaps easy to see that until the mid to late 1970s this discipline wasn’t particularly important. The few people who had access to computers were academics or professionals with a few incredibly dedicated hobbyists thrown into the mix. Without a broad base of users; it wasn’t necessary to focus on how those users interacted with computers – they just made do with whatever was to hand or created what they needed themselves.

For example, data may be input on terminals at a branch bank and then transmitted to the central processing unit at the headquarters bank. The information produced by the central processing unit may then be transmitted to the international offices, where it is printed out. Meanwhile, disks with stored data may be kept in bank headquarters and duplicate data kept on disk or tape in a warehouse across town for safekeeping.

The MOS 6502 was introduced at a conference in San Francisco at a cost of $25, far less than comparable processors from Intel and Motorola, leading some attendees to believe that the company was perpetrating a hoax. The chip quickly became popular with designers of early personal computers like the Apple II and Commodore PET, as well as game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System. The 6502 and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. The Control Data Corporation performs up to 3 million instructions per second —three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM 7030 supercomputer.

These devices are usually connected to the computer by telephone lines. For instance, the computer and storage that has the information on your checking account may be located in bank headquarters. But the terminals are located in branch banks all over town so a teller in any branch can find out what your balance is. In one type of network, a local area network , personal computers in an office are hooked together so that users can communicate with each other. Users can operate their personal computers independently or in cooperation with other PCs or mainframes to exchange data and share resources. The processor, as we noted, is also called the central processing unit .

This chapter provides a first examination of the principal forms of supercomputer architecture and the underlying concepts that govern their performance. The hardware devices attached to the computer are called peripheral equipment. Peripheral equipment includes all input, output, and secondary storage devices. In the case of personal computers, some of the input, output, and storage devices are built into the same physical unit.

Research in cohesion and coupling has its roots in the early 1970s as part of the development of modules. Structured design formalized the process of creating modules, recognizing that better written modules were self-contained and independent of each other. This functional independence was achieved by making modules that were of a single purpose, avoided interaction with other modules, and hides implementation details. Programming is an interdisciplinary topic, incorporating elements from subjects such as mathematics, software engineering and linguistics. Programming language theoryinvolves looking at the design, implementation, analysis, characterization and classification of programming languages and their individual features. Your introductory courses will teach you one or more programming languages.