A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMPUERS:

First Generation: Vacuum Tubes 

ENIAC The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), designed and constructed at the University of Pennsylvania, was the world’s first general-purpose electronic digital computer. The project was a response to U.S needs during World War II. John Mauchly, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and John Eckert, one of his graduate students, proposed to build a general-purpose computer using vacuum tubes for the BRL’s application. In 1943, the Army accepted this proposal, and work began on the ENIAC. The resulting machine was enormous, weighing 30 tons, occupying 1500 square feet of floor space, and containing more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. When operating, it consumed 140 kilowatts of power. It was also substantially faster than any electromechanical computer, capable of 5000 additions per second. The ENIAC was completed in 1946, too late to be used in the war effort. The use of the ENIAC for a purpose other than that for which it was built demonstrated its general-purpose nature. The ENIAC continued to operate under BRL management until 1955, when it was disassembled.

THE VON NEUMANN MACHINE

 The task of entering and altering programs for the ENIAC was extremely tedious. The programming process can be easy if the program could be represented in a form suitable for storing in memory alongside the data. Then, a computer could get its instructions by reading them from memory, and a program could be set or altered by setting the values of a portion of memory. This idea is known as the stored-program concept. The first publication of the idea was in a 1945 proposal by von Neumann for a new computer, the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer). In 1946, von Neumann and his colleagues began the design of a new stored-program computer, referred to as the IAS computer, at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. The IAS computer,although not completed until 1952,is the prototype of all subsequent general-purpose computers.

A main memory, which stores both data and instruction 

• An arithmetic and logic unit (ALU) capable of operating on binary data 

 • A control unit, which interprets the instructions in memory and causes them to be executed 

 • Input and output (I/O) equipment operated by the control unit 

 This structure was outlined in von Neumann’s earlier proposal, which is worth quoting at this point:

 First: Because the device is primarily a computer, it will have to perform the elementary operations of arithmetic most frequently. At any rate a central arithmetical part of the device will probably have to exist and this constitutes the first specific part: CA.

 Second: The logical control of the device, that is, the proper sequencing of its operations, can be most efficiently carried out by a central control organ. By the central control and the organs which perform it form the second specific part: CC

Third: Any device which is to carry out long and complicated sequences of operations (specifically of calculations) must have a considerable memory . . . At any rate, the total memory constitutes the third specific part of the device: M.

 Fourth: The device must have organs to transfer . . . information from R into its specific parts C and M. These organs form its input, the fourth specific part:

 Fifth: The device must have organs to transfer . . . from its specific parts C and M into R. These organs form its output, the fifth specific part: O. The control unit operates the IAS by fetching instructions from memory and executing them one at a time. 

A more detailed structure diagram is shown in Figure 1.2. This figure reveals that both the control unit and the ALU contain storage locations, called registers, defined as follows: