Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On February 14, 1946, people were working and living as usual in Philadelphia, southeastern Pennsylvania.

Suddenly, they found that the light in the room dimmed.

People who have just experienced World War II are used to this situation. They thought to themselves, "is there something wrong with the power lines?"

In fact, the reason why the lights are dim is not because of the wiring problem, but in the University of Pennsylvania, which is not far from them, a "behemoth" was born.

The behemoth covers an area of 170 square meters and weighs 30 tons. It lives on electricity and has a power of up to 150 kilowatts. Its start-up directly lowers the voltage of electricity used by nearby residents, so the lights are dimmed.

What on earth is this "behemoth"?

Yes, it was man's first general-purpose electronic computer-ENIAC (Enyak).

ENIACENIAC uses 17468 vacuum tubes (which is one of the main reasons for its large size and high power consumption) and can perform 5000 additions or multiplications per second, about 200000 times that calculated by hand.

Its birth is of great significance to mankind as a whole, which marks that mankind has officially entered the electronic computer age.

█ from knotted notes to Arabic numerals: the budding ENIAC of numeracy is a milestone. It divides the history of human numeracy into two parts.

Before moving on to the second half, let's review the history of the first half.

Since ancient times, man has mastered the power of calculation. Our "native" arithmetic tool is the brain.

Our process of using arithmetic is called "thinking". Correspondingly, the process in which we collect information is called "observation".

The so-called "calculation" is actually the process of solving the problem. If we encounter problems and solve them by calculation, we will achieve progress and development.

In the whole process, human beings are the subject, and information is the input and output. Experience and technology are the methods. The ability to complete the whole calculation process is Computing Power.

Animals have brains and numeracy, but they are not nearly as strong as we are. In the long process of evolution, our brains became more and more developed, which eventually helped us to stand out from all living things and become the masters of the earth.

In the early stages of human beings, the reason for the need for arithmetic is to survive. The main computing content is how to hunt, how to prevent attacks, and how to reproduce.

Later, with the basic security of survival, human beings began to use more computing power to improve the quality of life, such as building houses, trading goods, making tools and so on.

Calculation is the process of processing information. Therefore, how to express and record information is the first step in the implementation of calculation.

In primitive society, in order to better describe the information they have observed (see, hear, think), and to communicate information more conveniently, they began to paint.

The murals of primitive people later invented characters on the basis of painting.

Early hieroglyphic characters, in fact, use ideographic symbols to "encode" information.

It is a mapping and expression of the physical world and the spiritual world. With words, the efficiency of recording and transmission of information has been greatly improved, human society has a stronger connection, and history and civilization are easier to pass on.

There is also a very special symbol in the text, that is, numbers.

All the early advanced civilizations of mankind had their own characters and their own digital systems. For example, the hexadecimal system of Babylonian civilization, the decimal or octadecimal system of Mayan civilization, and the decimal system of Chinese and ancient Egypt.

After the emergence of numbers, the process of counting and counting is called calculation. (let's call the previous macro calculation "broad sense calculation" and here "narrow sense calculation". )

Ancient Greece took the lead in numbers and calculation, and established independent disciplines such as arithmetic, geometry, algebra and so on.

Pythagoras, an ancient Greek thinker, philosopher and mathematician, discovered and proved the Pythagorean theorem, which was a symbol of the level of calculation in that period.

Later, the Pythagorean school advocated that everything should be explained by numbers, believing that not only all things contain numbers, but also "all things are numbers".

Now it seems that this kind of thinking is very forward-looking. Some people have changed it to: "everything is a bit".

With the continuous progress of human society, the demand for computing is becoming more and more complex. It is not enough to rely on the brain as a "native" arithmetic tool. Not even with fingers and toes. So we began to use external computing tools.

In the earliest days, the external computing tools we used were straw rope and stone, that is, the so-called "knot recording".

The record of knot rope in China comes from the "system words" in the Book of changes: "the ancient times were ruled by ropes, and the saints of later generations were changed by books." Our common Chinese knot now also comes from the "knot record".

Later, civilization continued to develop, and we had arithmetic (a small stick for computing).

In China, computing was born in the Spring and Autumn and warring States period. The idioms we often use, such as strategic planning, helplessness, superior skills, and so on, are all related to arithmetic.

In 480 AD, Zu Chongzhi accurately calculated pi to the seventh place after the decimal point (3.1415926), using the tool of arithmetic. His record has been kept for more than 900 years.

In addition to calculating chips, we also have a better-known tool for calculating power, that is, the abacus.

There is no way to verify the exact birth time of the abacus. Some people say it is the Qin Dynasty, while others say it is the Eastern Han Dynasty. The word "abacus" first appeared in Xu Yue's book "Records of Mathematical skills" in the Eastern Han Dynasty.

I don't need to say much about the historical value of the abacus. Up to now, we can still see it.

In the 3rd century AD, the ancient Indians of the Gupta dynasty invented Arabic numerals, which was of great significance. Later, the rise of Arab empires brought Arabic numerals to Europe.

Also brought to Europe is papermaking, one of the four great inventions of China.

As I mentioned earlier, pictures and words are the way human beings express information. This information must need a carrier. The early carriers were tortoise shell, animal bone, animal skin, bamboo slips, wooden slips and silk. These carriers are either scarce, expensive or cannot be preserved for a long time.

During the Western Han Dynasty, papermaking appeared in China, but the craftsmanship was simple and the quality was poor. Later, in the first year of Yuan Xing in the Eastern Han Dynasty (105 years), the eunuch Cai Lun summed up the experience of his predecessors and improved the papermaking process, which significantly improved the quality of paper and laid the foundation for the popularization of paper.

The emergence and popularization of Cai Lun paper greatly facilitates the recording and transmission of information, is conducive to cultural dissemination, but also improves production efficiency.

Arabic numerals and papermaking were introduced into Europe, the former replacing lengthy Roman numerals and the latter replacing expensive sheepskin and calfskin. In addition, Chinese printing spread in the past, which greatly promoted the development of European culture.

All this also paved the way for the later Renaissance and the budding of science and technology.

█ from Calculator to differential Machine: the Xu Li of Computational Power in the 14th century, as we all know, Europe began the Renaissance, humanism dominated the mainstream, and people began to advocate understanding the world through observation and experiment.

In the 16th century, technology began to explode in Europe.

During that period, the whole of Europe was starry, fruitful in the fields of art and science, and the level of productivity skyrocketed.

Mathematics, as the basis of all scientific disciplines, has made the greatest progress in research. Analytic geometry, calculus, etc., were born. A large number of talented mathematicians output a large number of research results, which not only laid the foundation for the take-off of other disciplines, but also directly contributed to the later industrial revolution.

At that time, in order to better serve mathematical calculation, people invented a new type of computing tool. For example, in 1625, the English mathematician William William Oughtred invented the slide rule. In 1642, the French mathematician Blaize Pascal (Blaise Pascal) invented man's earliest mechanical computer.

These inventions can assist in completing complex tasks such as logarithmic calculation, trigonometric function calculation, root opening calculation and so on, and improve the calculation efficiency.

Later, from the end of the 17th century to the middle of the 18th century, German mathematician Gottfried Gottfried Leibniz and others successively designed and built devices capable of calculating multiplication, raising arithmetic tools to a higher level.

Leibniz in the 1860s, the first industrial revolution broke out, bringing mankind into the steam age.

The rise of power machinery has begun to replace manual labor and become the main productive force. Computing tools also began to evolve in the direction of more advanced mechanization.

If computing tools want to be mechanized, they must first solve the problem of how to express information. Because the machine is illiterate, we must first invent a "language" that the machine can understand before we can make the machine work according to orders.

This early machine language expression is "punching".

In 1725, the Frenchman Basler Basile Bouchon invented punch cards (punch cards) for looms.

In the knitting process of the loom, the knitting needle will slide back and forth. According to the small hole in the punch card, the knitting needle can draw the warp thread (if there is no hole, no hook), thus drawing the pattern. In other words, a punch card is a memory that stores a "pattern program" to control the loom.

This invention marks the beginning of the form of human mechanized information storage.

In 1801, the French loom craftsman Joseph Marier Joseph Marie Jdakacquard upgraded the punch card.

He bundled the punch cards in a certain order into ribbons, creating a prototype of punched paper tape (Punched Tape). This kind of paper tape is used in jacquard looms.

You should be able to see that drilling is actually a way to encode information. It is simpler than words and numbers and allows people to "communicate" with machines.

In 1811, Charles Babbage, a 20-year-old British inventor, took inspiration from the jacquard loom and began to design and build a device called the differential machine.

Ten years later, the "difference machine" was built and can perform a variety of functional operations with an accuracy of 6 decimal places.

Inspired by this achievement, Babbage launched the research of a second "differential engine" with an accuracy of 20 digits. The British government also funded his research.

Unfortunately, because the design of the machine was too advanced (there were more than 25000 parts, the error of the main parts should not exceed 1/1000 per inch), it was difficult for the mechanical manufacturing level at that time to meet the precision requirements. Therefore, after 20 years and a huge amount of money, this "difference machine" has not been built.

Later generations copied the difference machine No. 2, which proved that it could work properly in this process. In 1834, Babbage also put forward a bolder idea-- to design a steam-powered general-purpose mathematical computer. It can automatically solve complex problems with 100 variables, each of which can reach 25 digits, and the speed can be up to once per second.

Babbage calls this new design an "analytical engine".

The "analytical engine", like the second difference machine, was ultimately unsuccessful. But many of the designs included in the "analytical engine", such as the institutions that send and retrieve data, as well as "repositories" and "computing rooms", are the same as computers more than a hundred years later.

Therefore, the "analytical machine" is called the world's first computer by later generations. Babbage, on the other hand, is known as the originator of computers.

It is worth mentioning that in technical cooperation with Babbage, there is a little sister named Ada Augusta (Ada Augusta). She is the only daughter of the poet Byron. At that time, she was in charge of programming for the Analytical engine. As a result, she is called the world's first "programmer".

Ada Augusta in 1878, the Swedish inventor Ornell invented a gear computer with variable number of teeth in Russia, which is also one of the representatives of mechanical computers.

By 1885, more and more computers had been born in Europe and the United States, becoming a trend.

In 1890, the appearance of a great man made the punch-in technology further carry forward. This man is a German-American, Herman Holly (Herman Hollerith).

Herman Holleri invented the punch card tabulator on the basis of punched cards, which is specially used to collect and count census data.

Punch card tabulator the statistical speed of punch card tabulator is faster.

According to historical records, in the 1890 American census, through punching film and punching machines, the statistical work was completed in only six weeks, and accurate data (62622250 people) were obtained. In the previous 1880 U. S. census, the data were processed by hand and took seven years to get the final results.

With such a huge improvement in efficiency, watchmaking machines are rapidly popularized in various industries. It marks the beginning of the era of semi-automatic data processing.

Punch card technology was still in use until the 1960s, and then, in 1896, Herman Holly founded the watchmaking Machine Company (Tabulating Machine Company). This company is the predecessor of IBM.

█ from Turing Machine to ENIAC: after the rise of computing power in the 20th century, with the rapid development of electronic technology, computers began the transition from mechanical to electronic.

In the mechanical age, computers can mark numbers through gears or graduated cylinders. In the electronic age, this is not appropriate. Electricity is characterized by (electrified) and non-electrified, it is more suitable, obviously binary.

In the second half of the 17th century, the German mathematician Leibniz was the first to come up with binary (yes, him again. He is also the inventor of calculus. )

He vividly uses 1 to represent God, 0 to represent nothingness, and God creates all objects out of nothingness.

In the middle of the 19th century, the British mathematical logician George Boolean (George Boole) proposed logical algebra (later known as "Boolean algebra").

George Boolean unifies arithmetic with simple logic through binary, and provides us with a tool to understand and manipulate logical relations by using logical operators such as and, OR, and not, as well as binary logic based on true and false.

Boolean algebra paved the way for the design of binary and switching logic circuits of computers, and finally laid a mathematical foundation for the invention of modern computers.

In addition to the logical foundation, the hardware should also keep up with it.

In 1904, the Englishman John Ambrose Fleming (John Ambrose Fleming) invented the vacuum electronic diode, which can realize unidirectional conduction, detection and rectification. In 1906, the American de Forrest (Lee De Forest) improved on the basis of the diode and invented the vacuum three-stage electron tube, which can amplify the signal.

The emergence of de Forrest vacuum tube has promoted human electronic technology to take a big step forward and made up for the hardware deficiency.

During that period, information storage technology also made great progress.

In 1898, Danish engineer Vatima Paulson (Valdemar Poulsen) adopted magnetic wire technology for the first time in her Telegraph, making it the first practical magneto-acoustic recording and reproducing equipment.

In 1928, Fritz Pfleumer, a German engineer, invented the audio tape. In 1932, Austrian engineer Gustav Tossek (Gustav Tauschek) invented the magnetic drum memory. The era of magnetic storage has officially begun.

Magnetic drum memory in 1937, Alan M. Turing of the University of Cambridge in England put forward a mathematical model called "Turing machine". This points the way for the logical working of modern computers.

Alan Turing was also in 1937, and George George Stibitz of the Bell Laboratory demonstrated a device that uses relays to represent binaries. Although it is only an exhibit, it is the first binary electronic computer.

After the outbreak of World War II, military demand greatly stimulated the development of computing power. The military needs more powerful computing power to complete important tasks such as password encryption and decryption, artillery trajectory calculation and even rocket launch.

In December 1941, the German Conrad Konrad Zuse completed the world's first programmable electronic computer, Z3. This computer is used for aerodynamic calculation, uses a large number of relays and vacuum tubes, can do 3 to 4 addition operations per second, and a multiplication takes 3 to 5 seconds. Later, Z3 was destroyed by Berlin bombing.

Conrad Chuze and Z3 (duplicate version) in 1942, Atanassov (John V.Atanasoff), associate professor of physics at Iowa State University, and his student Clifford Berry designed and built the world's first electronic computer, called "ABC" (Atanasoff-Berry Computer), also known as "Jenny machine".

The ABC computer ABC uses IBM's 80-column punch card as input and output, and uses vacuum tubes to process data in binary format. Data storage is the use of regenerated capacitor magnetic drum memory (Regenerative Capacitor Memory).

Although ABC cannot be programmed (only for solving linear equations), the use of binary numbers to represent data, the use of electronic components for calculation (rather than mechanical switches), calculation and memory separation are sufficient to prove that it is a modern digital electronic computer.

In 1944, with the support of IBM Company, Dr. Howard Aiken (Howard Aiken) of Harvard University successfully developed a general-purpose electronic computer-- Mark I, also known as ASCC (automatic Control sequence Calculator).

Howard Aiken and MARK IMark I are 16 meters long and weigh 4.3 tons, with 750000 parts, 800km of wires, 3 million connections, 3500 multipole relays and 2225 counters.

It can add or subtract three times in a second. It takes 6 seconds for multiplication, 15.3 seconds for division, and more than 1 minute for logarithmic or trigonometric functions. At that time, it was used to calculate the ballistic firemeter for the United States Navy.

It is worth mentioning that the first program to run on Mark I was initiated by John von Neumann on March 29, 1944. At the time, von Neumann was studying the Manhattan Project and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable option for an atomic bomb.

Von Neumann also needs to mention that there is a female naval reserve officer named Grace Hopper on Mark I's research team. She introduced the word "bug".

In 1945, in the course of operation, Mark II flew into a moth, causing a failure. Hopper wiped out the moth, solved the problem, and became the first person to "debug" the computer.

The moth was also posted on Mark II's journal, and finally, in February 1946, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, ENIAC was born.

Female programmers who are operating ENIAC need to clarify that although people have always called the ENIAC the world's first digital computer, this statement is actually controversial. The ABC mentioned earlier is a strong contender for this title.

ENIAC is not even in second place. There were a lot of digital computers in that period, and strictly speaking, ENIAC only ranked 11th. The mainstream view abroad is that the designers of ENIAC stole the design of ABC. In 1973, the United States court also ruled that the patent of ENIAC was cancelled and that the patent of ENIAC was a derivative of ABC.

We will not discuss who is the first. Anyway, around 1945, the wave of the birth of electronic computers marked that human computing power officially entered the era of digital electronic computers.

The magnificent information technology revolution is about to begin.

To be continued.

Please look forward to the brief History of World Computing (part two): the Information Revolution

References:

1. "Summary of the Development History of computers", Network

2. A brief History of the Development of Mathematical Power, Zhenrong, Lushan

Who invented the Mark I computer? ", thoughtco.com

4. "the pinnacle in the history of machinery! Let's take a look at the differential machine, the cutting-edge numerical control technology.

5. Wikipedia, Baidu encyclopedia

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fresh Jujube classroom (ID:xzclasscom), author: Xiaozaojun

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