FORMER AND GENERATIONS OF COMPUTERS

Former and GENERATIONS OF COMPUTERS. As distant ancestors of the computers should be seen essentially two devices: the machine and the machine Pascal analytical Babbage. Frenchman Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) one of the great philosophers and mathematicians in history, in 1639 invented a calculating machine to help his father Etienne Pascal as a collector who conducted endless operations, was to add a machine based on sprockets or gears, which are used in mechanical cash registers and the odometer of the car.

Pascal's machine

CHARLES BABBAGE

English mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage (1791-1871) devised in the nineteenth century, a machine that is more than a hundred years ahead of its time and could be considered the predecessor of modern electronic computers. Babagge designed a mechanical calculator automatic machine he called "differential machine" and for 1822 had constructed a small model for demonstration purposes. With financial assistance from the Government Babagge began construction of a "motor differential" large-scale steam-driven, continuous working for 10 years but in 1833 he lost interest in having "a better idea" the construction of what today is described as a mechanical digital computer to call "analytical machine." The design of this machine is that of a digital computer, a real computer that, at that time, only a genius could have imagined. Babbage wanted to be able to perform any mathematical operation based on the feeding of information through punched cards. These had been invented in France by Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782), Babbage's computers, were never completed, there were several reasons for their failure, lack of technical precision machinery and the limited technology of the time. After Babagge there would be a temporary loss of interest in computers.

BABBAGE'S MACHINE

Among the more direct ancestors of the Mark I. electromechanical parts of normal built by a team of IBM in 1944, ran numbers of 23 decimal places and could perform all the operations of arithmetic, the information output was recorded in punched cards and electric typewriters. It was very slow, requiring 3 to 5 seconds for a multiplication but was fully automatic and could complete long computations.

Mark I was the first of a series of computers designed and built under the direction of Aiken. The eruption of World War II produced a desperate need for compute capacity, especially for the army. There was new weapons systems for missing charts trajectories and other essential data. In 1942, J. Presper Eckert, John W. Mauchly and its partners in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, built a high-speed electronic computer to do the job, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)

First generation: 1947 ENIAC. First electronic digital computer in history. It was an experimental machine, was not in the programmable current sense, it was a huge apparatus that occupied an entire basement of the university, used 18,000 bulbs, was 167.3 square meters, consumed 180,000 watts of electrical power, used punched cards for entry and departure, had a multiplier, 1-obtensor divider of the square root and 2 summation, 5000 was able to do sums per second. The mathematician John von Neumann contributed to a new understanding of how to organize and build computers fast practices that were essential for future generations. 1949. EDVAC. First programmable computer. It was also a laboratory prototype, but already included in their design ideas central to the computers that make up today. This group included the use of computer RAM with a capacity of 1,000 words, they had punched cards or tickets punched tape devices and performance, some seeds were the size of a grand piano and equerían 2500 small tubes electrons.

1951. UNIVAC I. First computer business. 1953. IBM 701. The company International Business Machines, is dedivaba tabulation equipment to manufacture and registration unit to be used for tasks of massive accounting and documentation. These teams used the concept of punched card. The IBM 701 was the first in a long line of computers from this company, which later became the number one for its sales volume. 1954-1960. IBM continued with other models, which included a mass storage mechanism called magnetic drum, which would revolutionize the years and would become the magnetic disk. The company Remington Rand entered the competition. UNIVAC introduced new models. Second Generation. (1960-1964) Check the mid-60's electronics made significant progress, highlighted by the gradual replacement of the vacuum tube by the transistor, as well as how to communicate with these new computers were using more advanced languages and which are called "Languages High-level ". The first of these languages was developed in 1956 and was named COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language (Common Language oriented business), another was the FORTRAN (Formula Translation Formula Translator) used in engineering-type work.

Third generation. It was opened with a new generation of commercial presentation of the so-called "360 series" IBM taking qualitative advantages with respect to their predecessors, due to two main factors: are made based on clusters of transistors in miniature packages known as integrated circuits, for Furthermore, although programming languages is still high, now offer a method of communication with the programmer known as the operating system.