The Comparative Analysis Of The History Of The Computer Science And The Computer Engineering In The USA And Ukraine
HOWARD H.
AIKEN AND THE COMPUTER
Howard Aiken's contributions to the
development of the computer -notably the Harvard Mark I (IBM ASSC)
machine, and its successor the Mark II - are often excluded from the
mainstream history of computers on two technicalities. The first is
that Mark I and Mark II were electro-mechanical rather than
electronic; the second one is that Aiken was never convinced that
computer programs should be treated as data in what has come to be
known as the von Neumann concept, or the stored program.
It is not
proposed to discuss here the origins and significance of the stored
program. Nor I wish to deal with the related problem of whether the
machines before the stored program were or were not “computers”.
This subject is complicated by the confusion in actual names given to
machines. For example, the ENIAC, which did not incorporate a stored
program, was officially named a computer: Electronic Numeral
Integrator And Computer. But the first stored-program machine to be
put into regular operation was Maurice Wiles' EDSAC: Electronic Delay
Storage Automatic Calculator. It seems to be rather senseless to deny
many truly significant innovations (by H.H.Aiken and by Eckert and
Mauchly), which played an important role in the history of computers,
on the arbitrary ground that they did not incorporate the
stored-program concept. Additionally, in the case of Aiken, it is
significant that there is a current computer technology that does not
incorporate the stored programs and that is designated as (at least
by TEXAS INSTRUMENTS)
as “Harvard architecture”, though, it should more
properly be called “Aiken architecture”. In this
technology the program is fix and not subject to any alteration save
by intent - as in some computers used for telephone switching and in
ROM.
OPERATION
OF
THE ENIAC.
Aiken
was a visionary, a man ahead of his times. Grace Hopper and others
remember his prediction in the late 1940s, even before the vacuum
tube had been wholly replaced by the transistor, that the time would
come when a machine even more powerful than the giant machines of
those days could be fitted into a space as small as a shoe box.
Some
weeks before his death Aiken had made another prediction. He pointed
out that hardware considerations alone did not give a true picture of
computer costs. As hardware has become cheaper, software has been apt
to get more expensive. And then he gave us his final prediction: “The
time will come”, he said, “when manufacturers will gave
away hardware in order to sell software”. Time alone will tell
whether or not this was his final look ahead into the future.
DEVELOPMENT
OF COMPUTERS IN THE USA
In the early 1960s, when computers were
hulking mainframes that took up entire rooms, engineers were already
toying with the then - extravagant notion of building a computer
intended for the sole use of one person. by the early 1970s,
researches at Xerox's Polo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) had
realized that the pace of improvement in the technology of
semiconductors - the chips of silicon that are the building blocks of
present-day electronics - meant that sooner or later the PC would be
extravagant no longer. They foresaw that computing power would
someday be so cheap that engineers would be able to afford to devote
a great deal of it simply to making non-technical people more
comfortable with these new information - handling tools. in their
labs, they developed or refined much of what constitutes PCs today,
from “mouse” pointing devices to software
“windows”.
Although the work at Xerox PARC was
crucial, it was not the spark that took PCs out of the hands of
experts and into the popular imagination. That happened
inauspiciously in January 1975, when the magazine Popular
Electronics put a new kit for hobbyists,
called the Altair, on its cover. for the first time, anybody with
$400 and a soldering iron could buy and assemble his own computer.
The Altair inspired Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs to build the first
Apple computer, and a young college dropout named Bill Gates to write
software for it. Meanwhile. the person who deserves the credit for
inventing the Altair, an engineer named Ed Roberts, left the industry
he had spawned to go to medical school. Now he is a doctor in small
town in central Georgia.
To this day, researchers at Xerox and
elsewhere pooh-pooh the Altair as too primitive to have made use of
the technology they felt was needed to bring PCs to the masses. In a
sense, they are right. The Altair incorporated one of the first
single-chip microprocessor - a semiconductor chip, that contained all
the basic circuits needed to do calculations - called the Intel 8080.
Although the 8080 was advanced for its time, it was far too slow to
support the mouse, windows, and elaborate software Xerox had
developed. Indeed, it wasn't until 1984, when Apple Computer's
Macintosh burst onto the scene, that PCs were powerful enough to
fulfill the original vision of researchers. “The kind of
computing that people are trying to do today is just what we made at
PARC in the early 1970s,” says Alan Kay, a former Xerox
researcher who jumped to Apple in the early 1980s.
MACINTOSH PERFORMA 6200/6300
Researchers today are
proceeding in the same spirit that motivated Kay and his Xerox PARC
colleagues in the 1970s: to make information more accessible to
ordinary people. But a look into today's research labs reveals very
little that resembles what we think of now as a PC. For one thing,
researchers seem eager to abandon the keyboard and monitor that are
the PC's trademarks. Instead they are trying to devise PCs with
interpretive powers that are more humanlike - PCs that can hear you
and see you, can tell when you're in a bad mood and know to ask
questions when they don't understand something.
It is impossible
to predict the invention that, like the Altair, crystallize new
approaches in a way that captures people's imagination.
Top 20
computer systems
From soldering irons to SparcStations, from
MITS to Macintosh, personal computers have evolved from
do-it-yourself kits for electronic hobbyists into machines that
practically leap out of the box and set themselves up. What enabled
them to get from there to here? Innovation and determination. Here
are top 20 systems that made that rapid evolution possible.
MITS
Altair 8800
There once was a time when you
could buy a top-of-the-line computer for $395. The only catch was
that you had to build it yourself. Although the Altair 8800 wasn't
actually the first personal computer (Scelbi Computer Consulting`s
8008-based Scelbi-8H kit probably took that honor in 1973), it
grabbed attention. MITS sold 2000 of them in 1975 - more than any
single computer before it.
Based on Intel`s 8-bit 8080 processor,
the Altair 8800 kit included 256 bytes of memory (upgradable, of
course) and a toggle-switch-and-LED front panel. For amenities such
as keyboard, video terminals, and storage devices, you had to go to
one of the companies that sprang up to support the Altair with
expansion cards. In 1975, MITS offered 4- and 8-KB Altair versions of
BASIC, the first product developed by Bill Gates` and Paul Allen`s
new company, Microsoft.
If the personal computer hobbyists
movement was simmering, 1975 saw it come to a boil with the
introduction of the Altair 8800.
Apple
II
Those
of you who think of the IBM PC as the quintessential business
computers may be in for a surprise: The Apple II (together with
VisiCalc) was what really made people to look at personal computers
as business tools, not just toys.
The Apple II debuted at the
first West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco in 1977. With
built-in keyboard, graphics display, eight readily accessible
expansion slots, and BASIC built-into ROM, the Apple II was actually
easy to use. Some of its innovations, like built-in high-resolution
color graphics and a high-level language with graphics commands, are
still extraordinary features in desk top machines.
With a 6502
CPU, 16 KB of RAM, a 16-KB ROM, a cassette interface that never
really worked well (most Apple It ended up with the floppy drive the
was announced in 1978), and color graphics, the Apple II sold for
$1298.
Commondore PET
Also
introduced at the first West Coast Computer Fair, Commondore`s PET
(Personal Electronic Transactor) started a long line of expensive
personal computers that brought computers to the masses. (The VIC-20
that followed was the first computer to sell 1 million units, and the
Commondore 64 after that was the first to offer a whopping 64 KB of
memory.)
The keyboard and small monochrome display both fit in the
same one-piece unit. Like the Apple II, the PET ran on MOS
Technology's 6502. Its $795 price, key to the Pet's popularity
supplied only 4 KB of RAM but included a built-in cassette tape drive
for data storage and 8-KB version of Microsoft BASIC in its 14-KB
ROM.
Radio Shack TRS-80
Remember
the Trash 80? Sold at local Radio Shack stores in your choice of
color (Mercedes Silver), the TRS-80 was the first ready-to-go
computer to use Zilog`s Z80 processor.
The base unit was
essentially a thick keyboard with 4 KB of RAM and 4 KB of ROM (which
included BASIC). An optional expansion box that connected by ribbon
cable allowed for memory expansion. A Pink Pearl eraser was standard
equipment to keep those ribbon cable connections clean.
Much of
the first software for this system was distributed on audiocassettes
played in from Radio Shack cassette recorders.
Osborne
1 Portable
By the end of the 1970s, garage
start-ups were pass. Fortunately there were other entrepreneurial
possibilities. Take Adam Osborne, for example. He sold Osborne Books
to McGraw-Hill and started Osborne Computer. Its first product, the
24-pound Osborne 1 Portable, boasted a low price of $1795.
More
important, Osborne established the practice of bundling software - in
spades. The Osborne 1 came with nearly $1500 worth of programs:
WordStar, SuperCalc, BASIC, and a slew of CP/M utilities.
Business
was looking good until Osborne preannounced its next version while
sitting on a warehouse full of Osborne 1S. Oops. Reorganization under
Chapter 11 followed soon thereafter.
Xerox
Star
This is the system that launched a
thousand innovations in 1981. The work of some of the best people at
Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) went into it. Several of these
- the mouse and a desktop GUI with icons - showed up two years later
in Apple`s Lisa and Macintosh computers. The Star wasn't what you
would call a commercial success, however. The main problem seemed to
be how much it cost. It would be nice to believe that someone shifted
a decimal point somewhere: The pricing started at $50,000.
IBM
PC
Irony of ironies that someone at
mainframe-centric IBM recognized the business potential in personal
computers. The result was in 1981 landmark announcement of the IBM
PC. Thanks to an open architecture, IBM's clout, and Lotus 1-2-3
(announced one year later), the PC and its progeny made business
micros legitimate and transformed the personal computer world.
The
PC used Intel`s 16-bit 8088, and for $3000, it came with 64 KB of RAM
and a 51/4-inch
floppy drive. The printer adapter and monochrome monitor were extras,
as was the color graphics adapter.
Compaq
Portable
Compaq's Portable almost
single-handedly created the PC clone market. Although that was about
all you could do with it single-handedly - it weighed a ton. Columbia
Data Products just preceded Compaq that year with the first true IBM
PC clone but didn't survive. It was Compaq's quickly gained
reputation for engineering and quality, and its essentially 100
percent IBM compatibility (reverse-engineering, of course), that
legitimized the clone market. But was it really designed on a
napkin?
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model
100
Years before PC-compatible subnotebook
computers, Radio Shack came out with a book-size portable with a
combination of features, battery life, weight, and price that is
still unbeatable. (Of course, the Z80-based Model 100 didn't have to
run Windows.)
The $800 Model 100 had only an 8-row by 40-column
reflective LCD (large at the time) but supplied ROM-based
applications (including text editor, communications program, and
BASIC interpreter), a built-in modem, I/O ports, nonvolatile RAM, and
a great keyboard. Wieghing under 4 pounds, and with a battery life
measured in weeks (on four AA batteries), the Model 100 quickly
became the first popular laptop, especially among journalists.
With
its battery-backed RAM, the Model 100 was always in standby mode,
ready to take notes, write a report, or go on-line. NEC`s PC 8201 was
essentially the same Kyocera-manufectured system.
Apple
Macintosh
Whether you saw it as a
seductive invitation to personal computing or a cop-out to wimps who
were afraid of a command line, Apple`s Macintosh and its GUI
generated even more excitement than the IBM PC. Apple`s R&D
people were inspired by critical ideas from Xerox PARK (and practiced
on Apple`s Lisa) but added many of their own ideas to create a
polished product that changed the way people use computers.
The
original Macintosh used Motorola's 16-bit 68000 microprocessor. At
$2495, the system offered a built-in-high-resolution monochrome
display, the Mac OS, and a single-button mouse. With only 128 KB of
RAM, the Mac was underpowered at first. But Apple included some key
applications that made the Macintosh immediately useful. (It was
MacPaint that finally showed people what a mouse is good for.)
IBM
AT
George Orwell didn't