History of computing hardware

Metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) large-scale integration (LSI) then enabled semiconductor memory and the microprocessor, leading to another key breakthrough, the miniaturized personal computer (PC), in the 1970s.

– discuss][11][12][13] Ramon Llull invented the Lullian Circle: a notional machine for calculating answers to philosophical questions (in this case, to do with Christianity) via logical combinatorics.

[d] Since real numbers can be represented as distances or intervals on a line, the slide rule was invented in the 1620s, shortly after Napier's work, to allow multiplication and division operations to be carried out significantly faster than was previously possible.

[34][35] By the 20th century, earlier mechanical calculators, cash registers, accounting machines, and so on were redesigned to use electric motors, with gear position as the representation for the state of a variable.

The tube technology was superseded in June 1963 by the U.S. manufactured Friden EC-130, which had an all-transistor design, a stack of four 13-digit numbers displayed on a 5-inch (13 cm) CRT, and introduced reverse Polish notation (RPN).

[43] Babbage, often regarded as the "father of the computer," envisioned a fully mechanical system of gears and wheels, powered by steam, capable of handling complex calculations that previously required intensive manual labor.

[50] Babbage's machine would have featured multiple output devices, including a printer, a curve plotter, and even a bell, demonstrating his ambition for versatile computational applications beyond simple arithmetic.

[55] The Industrial Revolution's advancements in mechanical systems demonstrated the potential for machines to conduct complex calculations, influencing engineers like Leonardo Torres Quevedo and Vannevar Bush in the early 20th century.

It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location and was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters.

[72] In the same year, electro-mechanical devices called bombes were built by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II.

The bombe's initial design was created in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing,[73] with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman.

[78] In two 1936 patent applications, Zuse also anticipated that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data—the key insight of what became known as the von Neumann architecture, first implemented in 1948 in America in the electromechanical IBM SSEC and in Britain in the fully electronic Manchester Baby.

Apparently his work remained largely unknown to engineers in the UK and US until much later, although at least IBM was aware of it as it financed his post-war startup company in 1946 in return for an option on Zuse's patents.

The term digital was first suggested by George Robert Stibitz and refers to where a signal, such as a voltage, is not used to directly represent a value (as it would be in an analog computer), but to encode it.

Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation 5 years later, converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system, using thousands of vacuum tubes.

[90] John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942,[91] the first binary electronic digital calculating device.

During World War II, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park, 40 miles (64 km) north of London, achieved a number of successes at breaking encrypted enemy military communications.

[95] Tommy Flowers, a senior engineer at the Post Office Research Station[96] was recommended to Max Newman by Alan Turing[97] and spent eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building the more flexible Colossus computer (which superseded the Heath Robinson).

Winston Churchill personally issued an order for their destruction into pieces no larger than a man's hand, to keep secret that the British were capable of cracking Lorenz SZ cyphers (from German rotor stream cipher machines) during the oncoming Cold War.

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.

[109] Early computing machines executed the set sequence of steps, known as a 'program', that could be altered by changing electrical connections using switches or a patch panel (or plugboard).

The computer is especially historically significant because of its pioneering inclusion of index registers, an innovation which made it easier for a program to read sequentially through an array of words in memory.

It was finally delivered to the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in August 1949, but due to a number of problems, the computer only began operation in 1951, and then only on a limited basis.

[131] The Gamma 3 had innovative features for its time including a dual-mode, software switchable, BCD and binary ALU, as well as a hardwired floating-point library for scientific computing.

Typically, second-generation computers were composed of large numbers of printed circuit boards such as the IBM Standard Modular System,[144] each carrying one to four logic gates or flip-flops.

However, the machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory, so it was not the first completely transistorized computer.

The planar process was developed by Noyce's colleague Jean Hoerni in early 1959, based on Mohamed M. Atalla's work on semiconductor surface passivation by silicon dioxide at Bell Labs in the late 1950s.

[171] In addition to data processing, the MOSFET enabled the practical use of MOS transistors as memory cell storage elements, a function previously served by magnetic cores.

While which specific product is considered the first microcomputer system is a matter of debate, one of the earliest is R2E's Micral N (François Gernelle, André Truong) launched "early 1973" using the Intel 8008.

[183] Google has managed this by using fault-tolerant software to recover from hardware failures, and is even working on the concept of replacing entire server farms on-the-fly, during a service event.