A Brief History of Computing, starting in 150 BC

CS 441 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor

Folks have been using physical devices to perform computations for a long time.

Mechancial Devices

150 BC: Greeks, likely including Archimedes, built clockwork-like chains of gears such as the Antikythera mechanism to predict astronomical events such as eclipses, and to measure time and convert between calendars.
1640's: Blaise Pascal built a series of adding machines, which used a series of hand-cranked cogs to add (similar to a car's mechanical odometer), or via complement arithmetic, subtract; or via repeated addition, multiply.
1820's: Charles Babbage designed (but never built) a fully-mechanical polynomial evaluator, the difference engine, via the method of finite differences. He also started work on a fully programmable model, the analytical engine, but building the thing with rod logic would have taken a huge amount of labor.
1948: CURTA, a mass-produced fully-mechanical pocket calculator.
1949: MONIAC, a hydraulic computer, models the country's financial system using water.
1950's: the automatic transmission, a hydraulic computer, becomes cheap enough for ordinary people to buy.

Of course, there are serious limitations to mechanical devices: it's hard to even turn a corner with a rotating axle, just like it's hard to make a leak-free joint with liquids. One huge advantage of electronics is that wires are very easy to route, bend, and join.

Electromechancial Devices

1890: IBM corporation uses the patented electromechanical (mercury switches and relays) Hollerith tabulator to count up the punched cards that represent the 1890 census results. The 1891 Electrical Engineer raved: "This apparatus works unerringly as the mills of the gods, but beats them hollow as to speed."
1941: Konrad Zuse builds the world's first fully-programmable computer, the Zuse Z3. Sadly, it used scavenged telephone switching relays, and was built in wartime Germany, so it was ignored for years.

Fully Electronic: Vacuum Tubes and Transistors

1944: John von Neumann proposes using the same memory to store both program and data, now known as a "von Neumann machine". Previous designs used separate memories for program and data, known as the Harvard architecture.
1946: ENIAC, the first vacuum-tube electronic automatic computer, built by the US military. ENIAC is fully programmable. Vacuum tubes can switch in nanoseconds, like transistors, rather than milliseconds, like relays.
1956: IBM releases Fortran, the first successful programming language. Prior to Fortran, machines were typically programmed using a soldering iron, patch cables, machine code, or assembly.
1960's: IBM's System/360, which adds microcode and binary backward compatability using those newfangled transistors.
1964: Seymore Cray's CDC 6600 achieves amazing performance using superscalar processing, caching, newfangled transistors, liquid cooling, and offloading I/O to dedicated "peripheral processors", which were hyperthreading-style barrel processors.

Integrated Circuits

1971: Upstart Intel creates a single-chip CPU, the 4004, which computes 4-bit values at up to 0.74MHz, 0.1MIPS. 2,300 transistors.
1972: HP-35, the first electronic pocket calculator good enough to replace the slide rule, for only $395.
1972: Intel's 8008, 8-bit values at up to 0.5MHz. 2,500 transistors.
1978: Intel's 8086, 16-bit values at up to 10MHz, 1 MIPS. 29,000 transistors. Instruction set is "x86", still in use today!
late 1970's: "micro" digital computers, like the Apple I, become cheap enough for dedicated hobbyists to buy and solder together.
1981: digital computers, like the IBM PC, become cheap enough for ordinary people to buy pre-assembled. The notion of selling software is popularized by the upstart "Micro-soft" corporation.
1984: Apple releases a 32-bit personal computer, the Mac 128K.
1985: Intel's 80386, 32-bit values at up to 40MHz. 10 MIPS. 275,000 transistors.
1985: The notion of specialized hardware for graphics is popularized by Silicon Graphics corporation. RISC instruction sets are pushed by MIPS corporation.
1990: IBM introduces a superscalar RISC machine for personal computers, PowerPC.
1994: Intel's releases a 100MHz Pentium (P5) CPU. 120 MIPS (superscalar). 3 million transistors.
1990's: graphics hardware for personal computers takes off with GLQuake and other 3D games.
2000: Intel releases a 1 GHz Pentium III CPU. 1000+ MIPS. 10 million transistors.
2002: Intel releases a 3 GHz Pentium 4 CPU, with hyperthreading. 55 million transistors.
2002: Graphics cards become programmable in assembly language (ARB_fragment_program), and support dozens of threads.
2003: NVIDIA releases "Cg", a C++-like language for programming graphics cards. Limitations include a single write per program.
2003: AMD corporation introduces chips with a 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set, which Intel later adopts.
2004: Intel abandons plans for a 4GHz Pentium 4 chip.
2006: Intel releases dual-core and quad-core CPUs at around 2GHz. The great multithreaded programming model panic begins.
2007: Intel announces "V8" eight-core systems. Transistor counts reach billions.
2007: NVIDIA releases CUDA, a very C-like language for programming graphics cards for non-graphics tasks. Supports arbitrary reads and writes.
2008: Graphics hardware now supports between thousands and millions of threads, and use billions of transistors.

Major lessons:

CPUs are still clocked at 2-4 GHz, just like in 2002. So in the future, your machine won't have very many more GHz, instead it will have many more cores. Nobody knows how we will program those cores!
For highly parallel problems, graphics cards already dramatically surpass CPU parallelism and hence performance. Thousand-core graphics software is commonplace; thousand-core threaded CPU software is unheard-of.
Technology changes, like gears to relays, relays to vacuum tubes, or tubes to transistors, have the capability to totally re-make the computer industry in less than 10 years. Biological/nano or quantum computing has a similar potential!