1
Lecture 1
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
Mr. Charles Babbage was the creator of the Analytical Engine - the first general-purpose digital computer (1833). The Analytical Engine was not built until 1943 in the form of the Harvard Mark1.
The Analytical Engine
The Analytical Engine was a programmable, mechanical, digital machine which could carry out any mathematical calculations and could make decisions based upon the results of previous calculations. It was crank-driven, could store instructions and had the ability to print. Its permanent memory known as Punched Cards invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard .The main components of this Engine were
- Input
- Memory
- Processor
- Output
Punched Cards (1801)
Punched Cards invented by Joseph -Marie Jacquard in 1801for storing wearing patterns for Automated Textile Looms (Khuddian). Initially had no relationship with computers. Their value for sorting computer related information was later realized by the early computer builders. Punched Cards were replaced my magnetic storage only in the early 1950.
Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-52)
Ms. Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the mother of Computing, wrote a program for computing Bernoulli’s Sequence on Analytical Engine-world’s 1st computer program. US Department of Defense used a programming language for developing military applications which was named as ADA to honor the contributions of Ms. Ada, Countess of Lovelace.
Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov
In 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputer designed by IBM, beat Gary Kasparov, the WorldChess Champion. It could analyze up to 300 billion chess moves in three minutes. That computer was exceptionally fast, did not get tired or bored. It just kept onanalyzingthe situation and kept onsearchinguntil it found the perfect move from its list of possible moves
A lesson that we all can learn from Charles Babbage’s life
Mr. Charles Babbage had huge difficulties raising money to fund his research. As a last record he designed a clever mathematical scheme along with Ms. Ada, Countess of Lovelace. It was designed to increase their odds while gambling. They bet money on horse races to raise enough money to support their research experiment at the end the lost every penny that they had.
Lecture 2
Turing Machine:
Computers we see today are evolutes by a process of number of invention. In this regard Turing Machine was invented in 1936 by Alan Turing. He presented his simplified theoretical idea of fully capable computer now known as Turing Machine. The concept of his machine called theoretically perform any mathematical computation, was very important in the future development of the computer. It only read and writes the characters which locate under the read/write button of machine.
Turing Test 1950
TheTuring testproposed to determine if a computer has the ability to think .In Turing Test involves two people and a computer. In the Turing test a human interrogator types questions into a terminal and tries to guess which contestant is human based on the answers given. So far no computer has come close. The prize money to make such machine is 100,000 USD.
Vacuum Tube
It was invented by a British Scientist John A. Fleming in 1904 which led to invention of Electronic Computer after 35 years of invention of vacuum tube with usage of binary arithmetic.Vacuum tubes were used in the first computers like theENIAC
ABC 1939
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the world's first electronic digital computer. It was built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University during 1937-42. It led to use of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, parallel processing and a lot more.
Harvard Mark 1 – 1943
It was the last electromechanical computer which was designed by Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper at Harvard University. Mark Series started by Mark 1 Computer in 1944.
It weighs 5 tons with quantity of 55 feet long and 8 feet high and contains 760,000 separate pieces. It was used by US Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations and was in operation till 1959.
Data was stored and counted mechanically using 3000 decimal storage wheels, 1400 rotary dial switches, and 500 miles of wire. All output was displayed on an electric typewriter.By today’s standards it was quite slow and takes 3-5 seconds for a multiplication process.
ENIAC(Electrical Numerical Integrator andCalculator) – 1946
The U.S. military sponsored needed a calculating device for writing artillery-firing tables. John Mauchly was the chief consultant and J Presper Eckert was the chief engineer and they built the first (Electrical Numerical Integrator andCalculator). It took one year to design the ENIAC and 18 months and500,000 tax dollars to build it after they met in 1943. The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors.
Transistor – 1947
The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories in 16 December 1947 by Mr. William Shockley. It is the onlyalternative was the vacuum tubes. Compared to vacuum tubes, it is smaller in size with better reliability and lower power consumption and quite cheap.
Floppy Disk – 1950
The renowned storage device “Floppy Disk” was invented by Yoshiro Nakamatsat Imperial University, Tokyo in 1950.
UNIVAC 1 – 1951
The first commercially and general purpose successful electronic computer UNIVAC-1 was also was the first commercially and general purpose designed for both numeric and textual information. It was designed by Later J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in 1951(used by U.S. Bureau of Census).This computer can solve and process 2,000 instructions at once.
Compiler – 1952
Ms. Grace Murray Hopper developed the first software that could translate the high computer language to Machine Language known as compiler in 1952.
ARPANET – 1969
Dr. J.C.R. Licklider, head of U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency developed ARPANET in 1969 to connect 60,000 computers for communication among research organizations and universities in reaction to launch of Soviet Union’s Sputnik in 1957.
Intel 4004 – 1971
Mr. Ted Hoff along with the team of Intel invented the world's first universal microprocessor. He used silicon-gated MOPERATING SYSTEM technology to build a single chip CPU. They used 2,300 transistors in only 3 – 4 millimeters.In modernComputers, more than 5.5 million transistors performing hundreds of millions of calculations each seconds.
Altair 8800 – 1975
Edward Roberts, William Yates and Jim Bybee spent 1973-1974 and launched MITS (Micro Instruments Telemetry Systems) Altair 8800 in 1975. The price was 375 USD and contained only memory of 256 bytes having no keyboard, no display and no separate storage device. This invention led to BASIC by Bill Gates & Paul Allen.
Cray 1 – 1 976
Cray 1 was introduced in 1971. It is placed in The Computer Museum History Centre. It contains no microprocessors but individual integrated circuits. The hundred of Boards and thousands of wires had to fit accurately manually.
IBM PC – 1981
In August1981, IBM released their new computer named as IBM PC. The first IBM PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor. This machine was equipped with 16 kb of memory, expandable to 256kb. This machine came with one or two 160kFloppy Disks Drives and an optional color monitor. The price tagstarted at 1,565 USD.
Apple Macintosh – 1984
In January 1984, Apple introduced the first Macintosh having 128 kb of RAM until 512kb model came in market in September 1984 which became the general public aware of mouse-driven graphical user interface. This machine cost 2,495 USD.
World Wide Web -1989
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989 with the help of software engineers and a programmer
The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system and automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
"The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge."
Quantum Computing with Molecules
Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang
A quantum computer is a machine, as-yet imaginary, that performs calculations based on the behavior of particles at the sub-atomic level. If it is ever developed, capable of executing far more millions of instructions per second (MIPS) than any previous computer
A classical computer can do calculations on only one set of numbers at once while quantum computer can do calculations many different numbers at once. A classical computer is made up of bits while a quantum computer is made up of quantum bits.
LECTURE 3
Browser
Browser is an application program used to look at and interact with all the information available on World Wide Web.
The first Web Browser with graphical interface was named as Mosaic and was available first time in 1993.
Technically Browser is a client program that uses (HTTP) Hypertext Transfer Protocol to make requests of Web server throughout the internet on the behalf of the browser user
URL
URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the global address of a file (resource) accessible on the internet. Every web page has a unique address called URL. The URL was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994.
Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are used to access the next page or content of the website. You can move around the web with the help of URL and Hyperlinks. It is a gateway to access the other web pages.
In 5 November 2013 the indexed web contains at least 2.69 billion pages and the Dutch indexed web contain at least 273.63 million pages.
Search Engine
Search Engine provides a list of website where information easily access that you want to it.
What is a Web site?
A Web site is a related collection of files which consists the data of all the related documents needed to be published for any company or individual. It includes a Home Page which is the base page and you can navigate from this page to get all the required information available on website.
What is Home Page of a web site?
A home page is the first Web page also known as index page, main page and sometime called front page that is displayed after starting aWeb browser likeNetscape’s Navigator or Internet Explorer.
For example, you can specify that
" or " is your home page.
For a Web site developer, a home page is the first page presented when a user selects a site or presence on the World Wide Web.
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation (Mr. Berners-Lee).
The Semantic Web is a project that aims to change that by presenting Web page data in such a way that it is understood by computers, enabling machines to do the searching and combining of the Web's information without a human operator.
Lecture 4
Computer Types According to Capability
Supercomputers
Super Computers are used to solve extremely complex and large scale problems like weather prediction, simulation of atomic explosions, aircraft design and movie animation. Research laboratories also used it. Early supercomputers used a single or few processors working in parallel. Those processors were custom built for the supercomputers therefore it is very expensive.
Supercomputers unique in that unlike mainframe & personal computer designed to focus all their resources and capabilities on a single task at a time.
Cray-1, the first Super Computer was manufactured by Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. The Cray-1’s architect was Seymour Cray the chief engineer was Cray Research. Cray-1 can do 167 Million Calculation per second. While a supercomputer of a modern age is a computer that performs about trillion of instruction per second.
The most powerful Supercomputer builds by American Department of Energy named as ASCI White in February 2002. It can perform 12.3 Trillion calculations per second. It was 74,000 times faster than Cray 1 and 1,000 times faster than Deep Blue. It was used by the department for Nuclear Weapon Simulation & Complex 3D Simulation. In ASCI White 8192 processors were used and it has 6TB of memory and 160 TB of storage capacity.
The world’s fastest Supercomputer named Tianhe-2 or Milky Way-2 developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology.
Mainframe Computers
Mainframe Computers also called as enterprise computers. Many People can use this machine at one time and perform multiple intensive tasks can be performed easily with the help of this machine with the production of very reliable solutions to these tasks. Main users of Mainframe Computers are Industrial Organizations and Military. A very important benefit of Mainframe computers is that switching off of machine is not necessary to upgrade the machine. Main frame computer generally consist of multiple processors, GB’s of memory and TB’s of storage and its cost in millions of dollars.
Servers / Minicomputers
This machine lies between the work stations (Personal Computers) and main frame computers. They seem like Desktop computers but they are quite fast and more reliable. Some organizations use such type of computers having large data to process. Generally consist of 2 – 4 microprocessors GB’s of memory and TB’s of storage and its cost in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Desktops
Personal Computers and Workstations are types of Desktop Computers. Workstations are more powerful than Personal Computers. Normally consist of a single processor only, sometime 2 processors, along with MB’s of memory and GB’s of storage and its cost a few thousand dollars PC around a $1000.
Mostly Engineering Simulation Tasks and scientific applications can be solved with the help of Workstations.
Mobile Computer or Portable Computer
Laptops, Palmtops and wearable are very capable computers. These machines are light weight and low consumption of energy.
A laptop is also called notebook computers. Generally weigh around 2kg consist of special low power processor 256MB’s of memory and 400GB’s of storage and its costof 1500-2000USD. Their usage in similar to that of PCs. We can work for more than 2 hours on battery.
Palmtops
A palmtops are also called PDAs (personal digital assistant) hand held computers and pocket pc. Its allows the user to collect such information as contacts, appointments, files, programs etc.
The term PDAs was first used by John Scully at CES on 1992 while describing the Apple Newton.Generally weighless than a pound. Its consist of very low power processor,KB’s of memory and MB’s of storage and its costof 200-600USD. We can work for many hours on AA batteries. We can also used for web surfing, email and even as mobile phones.
In California, Blue Pacific is reported to operate at 3.9 teraflop (trillion floating point)
These include Hewlett-Packard's Palmtop and 3Com'sPalm Pilot.
Wearable Computers
Wearable computers are also known as body borne computers. These computers are built with the latest data capture and voice technology. They keep workers hands and eyes on the task at hand. These computers are small in size, carried in pocket, hand or elsewhere on the body. Its capability similar to PDA’s but more expensive. These computers always ON and accessible there is no need to turn the device ON or OFF. Another feature is the ability to multi task. It is not necessary to stop what you are doing to use the device. Each soldier of the future will be fitted with one.
Ranking w.r.t. installed number
- PC’s
- PDA’s
- Workstations
- Servers
- Wearable (picture is provided)
- Mainframes
- Supercomputers
Hardware
All the physical and permanents components of a Computer are called Computer Hardware such as a CPU, disk drives, CRT, or printer
Software
A set of instructions that operates various parts of the Hardware also called computer program.
All computers have the following essential hardware components:
Input
The devices used to input data or commands into the computer are called Input devices.
Includes keyboard, mouse, scanner, microphone etc
Processor
A processor is also known as the CPU or Central Processing Unit. It is a brain of a computer system from where all arithmetic and logical calculations and decisions are made. It handles all the operations that are required in order for the computer to process data into information.
Memory
Memory is an essential of a computer. Without its memory a computer would not be able to save any information and of hardly use.
Computer memory is a physical electronic device that is used to temporarily or permanently store applications and data. The performance of the computer system depends upon the size of the memory.
1. Primary Memory / Volatile Memory.
2. Secondary Memory / Non Volatile Memory.
Rom
Read-only memoryorROMis a form of data storage in computers and other electronic devices that cannot be easily altered or reprogrammed. RAM is referred to as volatile memory and is lost when the power is turned off whereas ROM in non-volatile and the contents are retained even after the power is switched off.
Ram
Random Access MemoryorRAMis a form of data storage that can be accessed randomly at any time, in any order and from any physical location in contrast to other storage devices, such as hard drives, where the physical location of the data determines the time taken to retrieve it. RAM is measured in megabytes and the speed is measured in nanoseconds and RAM chips can read data faster than ROM.
Storage
Storage device is a hardware device capable of holding information. Without a storage device a computer would not be able to save any information and would be considered a dumb terminal. There are two storage devices used in computers. A Primary Storage device such as computer Ram and a Secondary Storage device such as a computer hard drive.
Primary storage is considered as the main memory. It is much faster to access than secondary storage because it is accessed directly by the computer. It has the ability to store and retrieve information.