Nt1310 Unit 1 Research Paper

Technology is constantly evolving. Computers, tablets, and cell phones have changed drastically over the past several years. For many years, computers were not available for personal use. Computing machines did not emerge until the 1940’s and 1950’s. Questions about the ownership of the first programmable computer are still disputed today. It appears as if each country wants to take credit for this accomplishment. Computer enthusiasts believe that Great Britain’s Colossus Mark 1 computer in 1944 was the first programmable computer and others give credit to the United States’ ENIAC computer in 1946. However, in 1941, a relatively unknown German engineer built a programmable binary computer. His name was Howard Zuse and his Z3 computer

The Z3 had a binary memory unit, a binary floating-point processor, a control unit, and input and output devices. Figure 1 shows the building blocks of the Z3 computer. The binary unit stored up to sixty-four floating-point numbers. The floating-point representation is comparable to the IEEE 754 standard today. The program was kept on a punched tape and the instruction were coded using eight bits on each row of the tape (Rojas, 2000). There were three kinds of instructions: memory, input and output, and arithmetical operations which relied on telephone relays; 600 relays for the arithmetic unit, 1400 relays for the memory, and 600 relays for the control unit ("First Relay Computer," n.d.). There was a special keyboard to input instructions. Instructions on the punched tape could be placed in any order and the instructions Lu and Ld stopped the machine. This allowed the operator time to enter a number or jot down the results and then proceed with the program (Rojas, 1997). The Z3 contained sixty-four memory words that were loaded into two floating-point registers, called R1 and R2. Rojas points out, “The first load operation in a program (Pr z) transfers the contents of address z to R1; any other subsequent load operation transfers a word from memory to R2” (Rojas, 1997, p. 8). After the final instruction has performed the processor resets to its initial