ALTERNATIVE LEARNING SYSTEM
DIVISION OF CAMARINES SUR
DLP LEARNING ACTIVITY SHEET
NAME: LEVEL: SCORE: LAS NO:
ALS CLC: Gov. M. College ALS CLC SCHEDULE: DATE:
Type of Activity
/
Extended learning (individual Practice) Classroom Encounter others
Stand no: 6
Module:
Lesson: History of Computer
Competency:
Intent learning:
1. Characteristic of technologies used.
Value emphasis:Appreciation
Reference: Wikipedia.org
I. PRE TEST
Choose the answer in the box.
Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) Antikythera Mechanism Charles Babbage
Tide-Predicting Machine Manchester Baby Alan Turing
__________________1. The earliest mechanical analog.
__________________2. He is the father of computer who conceptualized and invented the
first
Mechanical computer.
__________________3. The first modern analog computer.
__________________4. The first automatic electronic digital computer.
__________________5. The first electronic stored-program computer.
II. CONCEPT NOTES
Computers and computing devices from different eras
Early computers were only conceived as calculating devices. Since ancient times,
simple manual devices like the abacus aided people in doing calculations. Early in the
Industrial Revolution, some mechanical devices were built to automate long tedious tasks,
such as guiding patterns for looms.
1. PRE-20TH CENTURY
The Ishango bone, a bone tool dating back to prehistoric
Africa.
Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of
years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers.
The earliest counting device was probably a form of tally
stick. Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile
Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which
represented counts of items, probably livestock or grains, sealed in hollow
unbaked clay containers. The use of counting rods is one example.
The abacus was initially used for
arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was
developed from devices used in Babylonia
as early as 2400 BC. Since then, many
other forms of reckoning boards or tables
have been invented. In a medieval
European counting house, a checkered
cloth would be placed on a table, and
markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid to calculating
sums of money.
The Antikythera mechanism, dating back to
ancient Greece circa 150–100 BC, is an early
analog computing device.
The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the
earliest mechanical analog "computer", according
to Derek J. de Solla Price. It was designed to
calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered
in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek
island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete,
and has been dated to c. 100 BC. Devices of a level
of complexity comparable to that of the
Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until a thousand years later.
Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for
astronomical and navigation use.
The slide rule was invented around
1620–1630, shortly after the publication
of the concept of the logarithm. It is a
hand-operated analog computer for doing
multiplication and division. As slide rule
development progressed, added scales
provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, as well as
transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular and hyperbolic
trigonometry and other functions. Slide rules with special scales are still used for quick
performance of routine calculations, such as the E6B circular slide rule used for time and
distance calculations on light aircraft.
2. FIRST COMPUTING DEVICE
A portion of Babbage's Difference engine.
Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer
and polymath, originated the concept of a
programmable computer. Considered the "father of
the computer", he conceptualized and invented the
first mechanical computer in the early 19th century.
After working on his revolutionary difference
engine, designed to aid in navigational calculations,
in 1833 he realized that a much more general
design, an Analytical Engine, was possible. The
input of programs and data was to be provided to
the machine via punched cards, a method being
used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as
the Jacquard loom. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter
and a bell.
The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The Engine
incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and
loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that
could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.
a. Analog computers
Sir William Thomson's third tide-
predicting machine design, 1879–81
The first modern analog computer was a
tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir
William Thomson in 1872. The differential
analyser, a mechanical analog computer
designed to solve differential equations by
integration using wheel-and-disc
mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876 by
James Thomson, the brother of the more
famous Lord Kelvin.
The success of digital electronic computers
had spelled the end for most analog
computing machines, but analog computers
remained in use during the 1950s in some
specialized applications such as education (control systems) and aircraft (slide
rule).
b. Digital computers
Replica of Zuse's Z3, the first fully automatic,
digital (electromechanical) computer.
Early digital computers were electromechanical;
electric switches drove mechanical relays to
perform the calculation. These devices had a
low operating speed and were eventually
superseded by much faster all-electric
computers, originally using vacuum tubes. The
Z2, created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in
1939, was one of the earliest examples of an
electromechanical relay computer.
c. Vacuum tubes and digital electronic circuits
Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and
electromechanical equivalents, at the same time that digital calculation replaced analog.
The engineer Tommy Flowers, working at the Post Office Research Station in London in
the 1930s, began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange.
Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation five years later,
converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data
processing system, using thousands of vacuum tubes.
In the US, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University
developed and tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942, the first
"automatic electronic digital computer". This design was also all-electronic and used
about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for
memory.
Colossus, the first electronic digital programmable
computing device, was used to break German
ciphers during World War II. Max Newman and
his colleagues commissioned Flowers to build the
Colossus. He spent eleven months from early
February 1943 designing and building the first
Colossus.
Colossus was the world's first electronic digital
programmable computer. It used a large number of
valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and
was capable of being configured to perform a
variety of boolean logical operations on its data, but it was not Turing-complete. Nine Mk II
Colossi were built (The Mk I was converted to an Mk II making ten machines in total). Colossus
Mark I contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Mark II with 2,400 valves, was both 5 times
faster and simpler to operate than Mark I, greatly speeding the decoding process.
ENIAC was the first electronic, Turing-
complete device, and performed ballistics
trajectory calculations for the United
States Army.
The ENIAC(Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer) was the first electronic programmable
computer built in the U.S. Although the ENIAC was
similar to the Colossus, it was much faster, more
flexible, and it was Turing-complete. Like the
Colossus, a "program" on the ENIAC was defined by
the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry
from the stored program electronic machines that came later. Once a program was written, it had to
be mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. The
programmers of the ENIAC were six women, often known collectively as the "ENIAC girls".
It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many
complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000 times a second, a thousand times faster than any
other machine. It also had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was
limited to 20 words (about 80 bytes). Built under the direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper
Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943
to full operation at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, using 200 kilowatts
of electric power and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of
thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors.
3. MODERN COMPUTERS
Concept of modern computer
The principle of the modern computer was proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936
paper, On Computable Numbers. Turing proposed a simple device that he called "Universal
Computing machine" and that is now known as a universal Turing machine. He proved that such a
machine is capable of computing anything that is computable by executing instructions (program)
stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. The fundamental concept of Turing's
design is the stored program, where all the instructions for computing are stored in memory. Von
Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper.
Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation. Except for the
limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, modern computers are said to be Turing-
complete, which is to say, they have algorithm execution capability equivalent to a universal
Turing machine.
a.Stored programs
A section of the Manchester Baby, the first electronic
stored-program computer. Early computing machines
had fixed programs. Changing its function required the
re-wiring and re-structuring of the machine. With the
proposal of the stored-program computer this changed.
A stored-program computer includes by design an
instruction set and can store in memory a set of
instructions (a program) that details the computation.
The theoretical basis for the stored-program computer
was laid by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical
Laboratory and began work on developing an electronic stored-program digital computer. His
1945 report "Proposed Electronic Calculator" was the first specification for such a device.
The Manchester Baby was the world's first stored-program computer. It was built at
the Victoria University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill,
and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.
b. Transistors
Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT)
The concept of a field-effect transistor was proposed
by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925. John Bardeen and
Walter Brattain, while working under William
Shockley at Bell Labs, built the first working
transistor, the point-contact transistor, in 1947, which
was followed by Shockley's bipolar junction transistor
in 1948. From 1955 onwards, transistors replaced
vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the
"second generation" of computers. Compared to
vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they
are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Junction transistors
were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life.
Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively
compact space. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were
difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of
specialised applications.
c. Integrated circuits
The next great advance in computing power came with the advent of the integrated circuit
(IC). The idea of the integrated circuit was first conceived by a radar scientist working for the
Royal Radar Establishment of the Ministry of Defence, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. Dummer
presented the first public description of an integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in
Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. on 7 May 1952.
The first working ICs were invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert
Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor. Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated
circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working integrated example on 12
September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new
device as "a body of semiconductor material ... wherein all the components of the electronic
circuit are completely integrated". However, Kilby's invention was a hybrid integrated circuit
(hybrid IC), rather than a monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip. Kilby's IC had external wire
connections, which made it difficult to mass-produce.
4. MOBILE COMPUTERS
The first mobile computers were heavy and ran from mains power. The 50lb IBM
5100 was an early example. Later portables such as the Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable
were considerably lighter but still needed to be plugged in.
The first laptops, such as the Grid Compass, removed this requirement by
incorporating batteries – and with the continued miniaturization of computing resources and
advancements in portable battery life, portable computers grew in popularity in the 2000s.
The same developments allowed manufacturers to integrate computing resources into
cellular mobile phones by the early 2000s.
These smartphones and tablets run on a variety of operating systems and recently
became the dominant computing device on the market. These are powered by System on a
Chip (SoCs), which are complete computers on a microchip the size of a coin.
III. INDIVIDUAL PRACTICE
Arrange in sequence of which appeared first.
__________1. Abacus
__________2. Slide Rule
__________3. Atanasoff – Berry Computer (ABC)
__________4. ENIAC
__________5. Antikythera mechanism
__________6. Colossus
__________7. Bipolar Junction Transistor
__________8. Integrated Circuit (IC)
__________9. Ishango bone
__________10. Laptop
__________11. Zuse’s Z3
__________12. Manchestra Baby
__________13. Tide-predicting machine
Answer Key:
Pre Test
1. Antikythera mechanism
2. Chales Babbage
3. Tide-Predicting Machine
4. Atanasoft – Berry Computer (ABC)
5. Manchester Baby
Individual Practice
_____2_____1. Abacus
_____4_____2. Slide Rule
_____7_____3. Atanasoff – Berry Computer (ABC)
_____9_____4. ENIAC
_____3_____5. Antikythera mechanism
_____8_____6. Colossus
____11_____7. Bipolar Junction Transistor
____12_____8. Integrated Circuit (IC)
_____1_____9. Ishango bone
____13_____10. Laptop
_____6_____11. Zuse’s Z3
____10_____12. Manchestra Baby
_____5_____13. Tide-predicting machine
Prepared By:
CIELO L. AGUILLON
BLW-Cabanbanan
