CSCI 1200

1. CSCI 1200 Introduction To Computing Julie Benoit jbenoit@cs.dal.ca

2. Announcements : Labs • start Monday. • as of lunchtime, none were full. • lots of space Wednesday. • Thursday, teaching lab 2 (35). • Mon, Thu & Wed teaching lab 1 (20).

3. Announcements : TAs Huiqiong Chen • huiqiong@cs.dal.ca • Tuesday & Wednesday Franklin Fezeu • fezeu@cs.dal.ca • Monday & Thursday

4. Announcements : Quiz • quiz each week. • normally Thurs, announced otherwise. • no quiz this week. • quiz next week, material from today. • 4 Multiple Choice & 2 Short Answer. • no make-up quizzes, two lowest grades are dropped.

5. Announcements : Testing Midterm : • February 19th in class. • 25 MC, 10 to 12 SA, matching question. Exam : • comprehensive. • during the exam period.

6. History of Computing • begins about 5000 years ago. • earliest devices help with counting (commerce & inventory). • early computing devices are NOT computers.

7. Motivation • People have trouble : • remembering things. • doing calculations. • managing large volumes of data. • completing monotonous tasks.

8. Abacus • memory aid. • place value notation. • trade increase. • very fast.

9. Abacus 1946 - the abacus beats the mechanical calculator. Private. T.N. Wood, the fastest mechanical calculator operator in the U.S. Army, used a contemporary state-of-the-art calculator, and was defeated in 4 out 5 speed competitions by Kiyoshi Matsuzaki, who used an abacus.

10. Pascal’s Calculator (1642) • Blaise Pascal. • rotating gears. • addition & subtraction. • father was a tax collector. • no commercial success : • expensive. • people worry jobs will be lost. • French currency not based on tens.

11. Leibniz’s Calculator (1694) • like Pascal’s calculator - used gears & dials, but could also multiply. • Leibniz studied Pascal's original notes & drawings, then improved on the design. • 1820 before a full four function calculator (Colmar’s Arithometer) was developed - the Arithometer was widely used up until the First World War.

12. Jacquard Loom (1801) • punched cards represent the pattern. • person needed much less skill and training to operate a Jacquard loom. Luddites - when technologies like the Jacquard Loom began replacing skilled craftsmen many became angry, and attempted to destroy the machines that put them out of work.

13. Difference Engine (1821) • Charles Babbage. • a steam powered, fully automatic machine for solving complex polynomial equations. • not completed : • limitations of technology - problem of scale. • very difficult to work with. • interest in another project - Analytical Engine.

14. Tabulating Machine (1890) • Herman Hollerith. • data represented on punched cards. • cards are sorted based on the position of the holes, data tabulated from the sorted cards. • the 1890 US Census is completed in six weeks (rather than in ten years, or more).

15. Computer • a computer is a general-purpose programmable machine. • early computing devices : • could not be programmed. • were designed for a specific task. • are NOT computers.

16. Analytical Engine • Babbage's real dream - build a general purpose programmable machine. • vision not realizable in the 19th century. • overall design, same as the modern computer - four smaller components.

17. Analytical Engine • input - read in a list of instructions. • processor - perform the instructions. • memory - hold the results of intermediate calculations. • output - print out the results.

18. Analytical Engine • Babbage is considered the “father of the computer”. • Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage : • credited as the first programmer. • promoter of Babbage’s work. • programming language ADA, developed for the United States Department of National Defense, named in her honour.

19. Computer • a device, usually electronic, that processes data according to a set of instructions (Collins Concise English Dictionary). • doesn’t matter how the device is constructed : • electrical, mechanical, optical.

20. First Computer? John Atanasoff & Clifford Berry (1942) - ABC Computer built with vacuum tubes, solved equations containing 29 variables. Howard Aiken & Grace Hopper (1944) - Mark 1, 55 feet long, 8 feet high, weighed 5 tons, contained nearly 760,000 separate parts, used by the US Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations until 1959.

21. First Computer? Konrad Zuse (1945) - Z3, world's first electronic, fully programmable computer, used old movie film to store programs and data. John Eckert & John Mauchly (1946) – ENIAC, 1000 times faster than Mark I, constructed using 18,000 vacuum tubes, programmed by manually rewiring and resetting switches, ENIAC weighed 30 tons, a vacuum tube burnt out once every 15 minutes…

22. First Computer? John Eckert & John Mauchly (1946) – …ENIAC used by the US military to do calculations for the design of the hydrogen bomb, weather prediction, cosmic-ray and random number studies, and wind-tunnel design.

23. First Computer? John Eckert & John Mauchly (1946) – …ENIAC used by the US military to do calculations for the design of the hydrogen bomb, weather prediction, cosmic-ray and random number studies, and wind-tunnel design.

24. 1st Generation • 1940’s & 1950's. • vacuum tubes. • huge (30 x 50 feet), could use as much energy as an entire city block of houses. • only used by government, military, & large research organizations. • tedious - slow to program. • expected that the world will never need more than a few dozen computers.

25. 2st Generation • late 1950's & 1960's. • constructed using transistors. • faster, smaller, more reliable. • programming languages like FORTRAN, BASIC and COBOL are introduced - make programming easier. • computers are opened up to more applications; airlines & small businesses can now afford them.

26. 3rd Generation • mid 1960's - 1970's. • constructed with integrated circuits -smaller transistors and wires on silicone chips. • miniaturization makes embedded computers possible; e.g. computers inside elevators, traffic lights and calculators.

27. 4th Generation • 1970's to present. • constructed with VLSI - millions of transistors on a single silicone chip). • single chip microprocessor. • extreme miniaturization, very low costs. • Apple Computers is founded in 1976, personal computers become a reality.