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Brief history of computers
Brief history of computers
Historical background of computers
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DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTERS
The first generation of computer which is from the year 1945 has been relatively large in size and very expensive due to the technology that we have back then. Goes by the name “Colossus”, it was the very first electronic computer developed. It is programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices. The vacuum tubes or known as thermionic valves is used to perform calculations. It serve as purpose to solve mathematic problem faced by the British military during World War II. Colossus is used to decrypt secret message from the German messages during World War II. However, the existence of Colossus has been kept secret until decades after the war. The first generation of computer were mainly used by the military, it does not commercially available for usage by the citizen.
In 1946, the first ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) had completely built, the development start in 1943 which took the ENIAC developer team a staggering 3 to 4 years to build it. 2 people designed this computer, which is John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert from United States. Same as the Colossus, ENIAC took a great deal in space. It took up to 170 metre squared of space, which is equivalent of one large room. Thousands of vacuum tubes, diodes, relays, resistors, capacitors, and a million of soldered joints is used to program ENIAC. The ENIAC weight up to about 30 tonnes and consume a great amount of power, roughly around 150kW. It is not practical as the vacuum tubes often breaks and need to be replaced. Finding the broken vacuum tubes is not an easy job to do, thus makes it requires a longer time from hours, days and even weeks to properly program it. The ENIAC serve a purpose as a device to print firing tables fo...
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...omputer with the intention of promoting the computer science to the world. It can be easily accessible by anybody to develop a program or anything which will contribute to the development of computers.
For the fifth generation computers, which are currently being developed with the objective to develop a device that can response to a natural language input, capable of learning, and also self-organization. It can be said as a development of artificial intelligence. Even though the technology is in development, there are still some application that is widely used today such as voice recognition. The fifth generation computers will be based on Quantum Computation, molecular and nanotechnology. It will significantly change the face of computers that we will see in future. It is seen as the fifth generation computers will match the power of human intelligence.
In the essay "Toward An Intelligence Beyond Man’s" by Robert Jastrow, the author showed his view on computer intelligence and predicted that computer intelligence will be a new kind of evolution. Jastrow stateed that computer nowadays is as intelligent as human brain; they can communicate with human, learn from experience, and raise logical questions. The more complex the computer, the better they imitate human. He predicted that computer will as important as life in future years. Then, Jastrow used the example of Arthur Samuel and IBM computer to show computers can learn faster through motivation, even they do not have emotions and drives as human do. He also points out that computer and human brain share some characteristics; they both freeze out when handle too many tasks, and they outclass fast decisions under a crisis. Jastrow said even human still have the control power, computers learn much faster than humans’ intelligence. Then, in an ultimate situation, computers and human w ill become partners; they completely depends on each other to survive. However, Jastrow thought this partnership will not stay long; as computer will become more and more clever , but human evolution of intelligence is almost finished. He suggested that computer will be the new kind of intelligence which surpass human, as a new evolution of life. He said the history had proved it takes a million year for human evolution. It took less time , compare to a billion years of evolution from worm to human. By the incredibly fast rate of technology improvement, Jastrow thought computer will evolve in a much shorter period of time.
The life of Edgar Allan Poe, was stuffed with tragedies that all affected his art. From the very start of his writing career, he adored writing poems for the ladies in his life. When he reached adulthood and came to the realization of how harsh life could be, his writing grew to be darker and more disturbing, possibly as a result of his intense experimenting with opium and alcohol. His stories continue to be some of the most frightening stories ever composed, because of this, some have considered this to be the reason behind these themes. Many historians and literature enthusiasts have presumed his volatile love life as the source while others have credited it to his substance abuse. The influence of his one-of-a-kind writing is more than likely a combination of both theories; but the main factor is the death of many of his loved ones and the abuse which he endured. This, not surprisingly, darkened his perspective considerably.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the newest fields in Science and Engineering. Work started in earnest soon after World War II, and the name itself was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy. Artificial Intelligence is an art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people [Kurzweil, 1990]. It encompasses a huge variety of subfields, ranging from general (learning and perception) to the specific, such as playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, writing poetry, driving a car on the crowded street, and diagnosing diseases. Artificial Intelligence is relevant to any intellectual task; it is truly a Universal field. In future, intelligent machines will replace or enhance human’s capabilities in
The subject of this term paper will be about computers in the 1950’s. The divisions that will be covered are; the types of computers there were, the memory capacity of computers, the programming languages of that time, and the uses of the computers for that time. Information will be gathered from the Internet, from books, and from magazines, and from the encyclopedia.
“…With the advent of everyday use of elaborate calculations, speed has become paramount to such a high degree that there is no machine on the market today capable of satisfying the full demand of modern computational methods. The most advanced machines have greatly reduced the time required for arriving at solutions to problems which might have required months or days by older procedures. This advance, however, is not adequate for many problems encountered in modern scientific work and the present invention is intended to reduce to seconds such lengthy computations…” From the ENIAC patent (No. 3,120,606), filed 26 June 1947.
Computers are a magnificent feat of technology. They have grown from simple calculators to machines with many functions and abilities. Computers have become so common that almost every home has at least one computer, and schools find them a good source for information and education for their students (Hafner, Katie, unknown). Computers have created new careers and eliminated others and have left a huge impact on our society. The invention of the computer has greatly affected the arts, the business world, and society and history in many different areas, but to understand how great these changes are, it is necessary to take a look at the origins of the computer.
As our research into science and technology ever increases its seems inevitable that in the near future Artificial Intelligent machines will exist and become part of our everyday life such as we see with modern computers today.
Most of the day the human mind is taking in information, analyzing it, storing it accordingly, and recalling past knowledge to solve problems logically. This is similar to the life of any computer. Humans gain information through the senses. Computers gain similar information through a video camera, a microphone, a touch pad or screen, and it is even possible for computers to analyze scent and chemicals. Humans also gain information through books, other people, and even computers, all of which computers can access through software, interfacing, and modems. For the past year speech recognition software products have become mainstream(Lyons,176). All of the ways that humans gain information are mimicked by computers. Humans then proceed to analyze and store the information accordingly. This is a computer's main function in today's society. Humans then take all of this information and solve problems logically. This is where things get complex. There are expert systems that can solve complex problems that humans train their whole lives for. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated the world champion in a game of chess(Karlgaard, p43). Expert systems design buildings, configure airplanes, and diagnose breathing problems. NASA's Deep Space One probe left with software that lets the probe diagnose problems and fix itself(Lyons).
Prior to the revolution in technology that was microprocessors, making a computer was a large task for any manufacturer. Computers used to be built solely on discrete, or individual, transistors soldered together. Microprocessors act as the brain of a computer, doing all mathematics. Depending on how powerful the machine was intended to be, this could take weeks or even months to produce with individual components. This laborious task put the cost of a computer beyond the reach of any regular person. Computers before lithographic technology were massive and were mostly used in lab scenarios (Brain 1).
It is a type of artificial intelligence program that imitated the analytical skills and understanding of human experts. By 1985, the artificial intelligence market had come up to one billion dollars; moreover, around the same time, Japan’s fifth generation computer project motivated the British and American government to bring back funding for artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, the artificial intelligence market fell back into disrepute which started with the fall of the Lisp Machine market. Additionally, this was a much longer “AI winter”. Soon, in the late 1900s and in the beginning of the 21st century, artificial intelligence was starting to be utilized for data mining, medical diagnosis, and in other areas as well as logistics. All this success was because of the increasing computational power, new relationships between other fields and artificial intelligence, higher significance on answering specific issues, and a commitment by researchers to scientific standards as well as mathematical methods. For example, on May 11th, 1997, Deep Blue (an IBM computer) was the first computer that played chess and it beat the ruling world chess champion at that time, Garry Kasparov. This was the beginning of an amazing discovery, artificial intelligence. Faster computers, able to obtain huge amounts of information, and statistical and advanced methods allowed progress in perception and machine learning. By the midyear of 2010, machine learning programs were utilized in the entire world. For example, Watson (IBM’s question answering system) beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two greatest champions of Jeopardy, in a Jeopardy exhibition match by huge amounts. Another example is of the Kinect. It gives a 3D body-motion interface for the Xbox One and the Xbox 360 using algorithms that surfaced from long artificial research. Soon, 2015 came. According to
In 500 B.C. the abacus was first used by the Babylonians as an aid to simple arithmetic. In 1623 Wihelm Schickard (1592 - 1635) invented a "Calculating Clock". This mechanical machine could add and subtract up to 6 digit numbers, and warned of an overflow by ringing a bell. J. H. Mueller comes up with the idea of the "difference engine", in 1786. This calculator could tabulate values of a polynomial. Muellers attempt to raise funds fails and the project was forgotten. Scheutz and his son Edward produced a 3rd order difference engine with a printer in 1843 and their government agreed to fund their next project.
Modern technology is changing mankind's way of life, and at the forefront, computers are paving the way. New media and technology offer new, and exciting jobs allowing humans to live at the speed of light. Computers have advanced our civilization and from now on, nothing will ever be the same. One thing is certain. Computer engineering will not be the same five years from now . . . maybe not even in five minutes.
Thousands of years ago calculations were done using people’s fingers and pebbles that were found just lying around. Technology has transformed so much that today the most complicated computations are done within seconds. Human dependency on computers is increasing everyday. Just think how hard it would be to live a week without a computer. We owe the advancements of computers and other such electronic devices to the intelligence of men of the past.
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.
In todays world computers are very useful because there is weather forcasting and many other things. People can forcast weather by this process by computers . Advertising is one of the most progressive field these days . Computer animation is the art of creating moving images by this use of computers . We can use use internation network (internet) to check mail, play games, find other's addresses , etc. Scientists also use computers for their experiments . There are some documents to type. For example MS Word , MS Exel , etc . We can do our school project also by using computers. There is one thing which is very conveinient for us it is that we can talk or chat with people who are in another country by using google talk , yahoo messenger , etc . It is not at all expensive . It is better than using a telephone or a mobile . We can also send voicemails through google talk , yahoo messenger , etc . We can play many games using a computer . For example pinball , soltaire , spider soltaire , etc . Believe it or not, but the age of computers is upon us. I believe Computers are not only here to stay, but in my opinion computers are the wave of the future. Only a device like the computer can change the way we work, live, and think. I see computers taking us places where no man has gone before. students can receive an education from their own home Taking classes online is an option that a growing number of students are taking advantage of. These classes are making a college education available for students who are not able to attend a traditional university or college. Computers are taking us places where a lot of us thought was not possible. Truly it is my belief and opinion, the computer is one of the most incredible inventions of this time period or any other.