First generation computers

Published at 10:18 AM in Computer

The development of computers has been around since pulahan year ago, due to the Second World War, the countries involved in the war sought to develop computers to exploit their potential strategic importance computer. This increased funding to accelerate the progress of the development of computer and computer engineering. In 1941, Konrad Zuse, a German engineer to build a computer Z3, to design airplanes and missiles.

Party allies also made other progress in the development of computer power. In 1943, the British completed the secret code-breaking computer called Colossus to decode German-secret used. The Colossus's impact influenced the development of the computer industry because of two reasons. First, Colossus was not a multi-purpose computer general-purpose computer, because the Colossus is only designed to decode secret messages. Second, the existence of these machines kept confidential until a decade after the war ended.

Work done by the Americans at that time produced some other advancement. Howard H. Aiken (1900-1973), a Harvard engineer working with IBM, succeeded in producing electronic calculators for the U.S. Navy. The calculator is a length of half a football field and has a range of 500 miles of cable. The Harvd-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or Mark I, an electronic computer. He uses electromagnetic signals to move the mechanical components. The machine beropreasi with slow (it takes 3-5 seconds for each calculation) and inflexible (the order of calculations can not be changed). The calculator can perform basic arithmetic calculations and equations are more complex.

Another computer development during this period was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), generated by the cooperation between the governments of the United States and the University of Pennsylvania. Consisting of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 5 million soldered joints, the computer is a machine that consumes huge power of 160kW. This computer was designed by John Presper Eckert (1919-1995) and John W. Mauchly (1907-1980), ENIAC is a versatile computer (general purpose computer) that work 1000 times faster than Mark I.

    In the mid-1940s, John von Neumann (1903-1957) joined the team of University of Pennsylvania in Usha build concept which couples the computer up to 40 years is still used in computer engineering.

    Von Neumann designed the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) in 1945 with a memory to accommodate both programs or data. This technique allows the computer to stop at some point and then resume her job back. The key factor von Neumann architecture is the Central processing unit (CPU), which allowed all computer functions to be coordinated through a single source. In 1951, UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I) made by Remington Rand, became the first commercial computer that uses the von Neumann architecture model. Both the United States Census Bureau and General Electric have UNIVAC. One of the impressive results achieved by the UNIVAC dalah success in predicting victory Dwilight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election.

   First generation computers were characterized by the fact that operating instructions are made specifically for a particular task. Each computer has a binary-coded program called a machine different language. This causes the computer is difficult to be programmed and the speed limit. Another feature is the use of first generation computer vacuum tube (which makes the computer at that time are very large) and magnetic cylinders for the storage of data.