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

Follow up the previous episode: a brief History of World arithmetic (part I)

In the previous article, Mr. Zaojun mentioned the birth of ENIAC.

In fact, from 1945 to 1948, when China was still in the period of civil war, in addition to the birth of ENIAC, several major events took place in the field of science and technology. These major events interact with each other and finally completely change the fate of mankind.

The first major event: the proposal of the von Neumann architecture

John Von Neumann, a Hungarian-American, was born in 1903 and immigrated to the United States in 1930 to become a professor at Princeton University.

Von Neumann in 1944, von Neumann began to participate in the development of the atomic bomb. Because the development process requires a lot of calculation, he began to pay attention to the progress of computer-related research. After being introduced, he participated in ENIAC's research as a consultant.

Based on the research of ENIAC, von Neumann et al put forward a new scheme-EDVAC (Electronic discrete variable computer) in 1945.

In the summary report "draft report on EDVAC" written by von Neumann, he elaborated on a new idea of manufacturing electronic computers and programming, and designed a new architecture composed of calculators, logic controls, memory, input and output devices.

Yes, that's right. This is the famous von Neumann architecture.

Von Neumann architecture up to now, von Neumann architecture is still the mainstream architecture of our computers. Based on this contribution, von Neumann is also known as the "father of modern computers". He is also known as the "father of game theory" for his outstanding contributions in the fields of mathematics and economics. )

The second major event: the proposal of information theory

In 1948, Claude Shannon (Claude Elwood Shannon) of Bell Laboratories published the Mathematical Theory of Communication. This book is regarded as the foundation work of information theory.

Shannon gives the basic model of communication system, and puts forward the concept and mathematical expression of information entropy.

He pointed out that information can be quantified and that any type of information can be represented by digital coding. Shannon also introduced the concept of bit, which is called "the unit used to measure information".

Shannon's formula, which is put forward by Shannon, has guided the development of the whole communication industry, but has not been broken through until now.

To put it simply, Shannon's information theory really laid a real theoretical foundation for information technology. He is a well-deserved "ancestor" of modern information and communication technology.

The third event: the invention of transistors

You don't have to say any more about this.

In 1947, William William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, also from Bell Labs, co-invented the world's first transistor.

The advent of transistors has opened up a new era in the electronic era.

The three major events mentioned above have laid a solid foundation for the information technology revolution. The information technology industry has begun to enter a stage of explosive development.

█ 1950-1967: in the era of integrated circuits, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who invented ENIAC, worked together again to develop the world's first commercial computer system-UNIVAC-1.

The UNIVAC system was used by the US Census Department for censuses. It also successfully predicted the US presidential election at the end of 1952 and became famous overnight.

In 1952, the EDVAC designed by von Neumann was finally finished and started to run.

Von Neumann had independent storage compared to EDVAC's ENIAC,EDVAC and was the first computer to use magnetic tape. At that time, magnetic storage had begun to show its edge and became a new choice for information carriers.

The application of transistors later, the transistor technology began to mature and entered the market.

Compared with vacuum tubes (electronic tubes), it is smaller in size and lower in power consumption, which makes electronic devices more compact and power-efficient.

In 1954, the world's first transistor computer, TRADIC, was put into use in the United States Air Force (developed by Bell Labs). Its operating power consumption is no more than 100W and its volume is no more than 1 cubic meter, which is very different from the ENIAC at that time.

In TRADIC1958, the RCA Company of the United States built the world's first computer using transistors-- the RCA501.

Soon after RCA501, in 1959, IBM did not want to lag behind and produced a fully transistorized computer, the IBM 7090.

IBM 7090 is based on IBM 7090. American Airlines and IBM have jointly developed the world's first booking system, Sabre. The rapid popularity of Sabre has led to a surge in the market share of IBM computers.

When it comes to the birth of the integrated circuit, let's go back to William Shockley, who invented the transistor.

Shockley's team worked together to invent the transistor, but the internal relationship was not good. The main reason is that Shockley is mean and difficult to get along with.

Soon after the invention of the transistor, the team members left him one after another.

In 1954, Shockley could no longer stay at Bell Labs and went to teach. Later, in 1956, he came to Mountain View, California, in the western United States, and set up the Shockley Semiconductor Lab in a small city called Palo Alto (later part of Silicon Valley).

The laboratory has attracted many outstanding young people to join. They include eight people, including Robert Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.

Later, Shockley's career once again got into trouble for personal reasons. So on September 18, 1957 (which was later named by the New York Times as one of the ten most important days in American history), the eight young people mentioned above tendered their resignations to Shockley. Shockley flew into a rage, denouncing the "ungrateful" young people and calling them "traitorous eight".

After the "eight traitors" left, they jointly founded Fairy Child Semiconductor (Fairchild Semiconductor).

This company should be familiar to everyone. It can be said to be the cradle of the world semiconductor industry and the Whampoa military Academy in the chip industry.

In 1959, Jack St Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invented integrated circuits based on germanium substrate diffusion process and silicon substrate plane process, which opened the door to the era of integrated circuits.

The integrated circuit invented by Kilby made extensive use of transistors and integrated circuits in computers after 1959. The size of the computer is shrinking and its function is increasing.

The budding software industry has faster processors, more memory, and richer I / O devices, which means it can take on more tasks.

As a result, the "multiprogramming system" appeared.

Before the "multiprogramming system", computers were operated manually, as well as batch systems, which were inefficient.

The "multiprogramming system", which uses channel and interrupt technology, allows the system to perform "suspend" operations. The computer has changed from serial to parallel, and can run multiple tasks at the same time, which improves the efficiency.

This system is basically close to the real operating system.

In addition to the operating system, computer language has also improved.

In 1957, IBM successfully developed the FORTRAN high-level language. It is the first high-level programming language in the world that has been formally adopted and spread so far.

The so-called high-level language is a programming language that is close to people's habits. It is easy to learn, versatile, the program written is relatively short, easy to promote and communicate.

In April 1960, the COBOL language was officially released. In 1964, the BASIC language was released.

The continuous emergence of high-level languages has laid the foundation for the outbreak of the software industry.

In the IBM System/3601960 era, IBM is undoubtedly the "leader" of the world computer industry. In the computer market, they occupy an absolute market leader (in the North American market, the market share is more than 2/3).

In December 1961, IBM launched the largest commercial product development program in human history. The project costs US $5 billion (about US $46 billion today), employs more than 60,000 new employees and builds five new factories.

On April 7, 1964, with the initial results of the plan, IBM officially released six specifications of System / 360 commercial mainframe.

IBM System/360360, which means a 360-degree angle, means full service. It is the first instruction set compatible computer in the world. A single operating system can be applied to the entire family without the need for each host to be tailored to the operating system, as in previous computers.

At this time, people understand that after the upgrade of the main hardware of the computer, the operating system, application software and peripheral hardware can continue to be used. the concept of "compatibility" began to take shape.

The IBM System / 360is the most successful model in IBM's history, and despite the huge R & D investment, the return is equally impressive-between $25 and $3 million per mainframe (about $20 million today), and more than 1,000 units are sold every month. Half of Big Blue's annual sales come from this series.

IBM System is used in NASA's Apollo moon landing, interbank trading systems across the United States, and the largest online ticketing system in the aviation industry.

It is worth mentioning that although IBM dominates the mainframe market, many IT companies were founded in the early 1960s, and they turned to the miniaturized computer market that IBM didn't care about, and achieved good results.

For example, DEC (founded in 1957) and their release of PDP-8, PDP-11, VAX-11 series of hosts.

Because of their small size, low power consumption and not bad computing speed (hundreds of thousands of basic operations per second), PDP-8 has been welcomed by many users.

█ 1967-1979: the wheel of the era of large-scale integrated circuits continues to roll forward. In 1967, large-scale integrated circuits (Large Scale Integration,LSI) appeared, and the real chip era came.

In July 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore resigned from Fairchild Semiconductor and founded Intel.

At first, Intel made semiconductor memory products. Later, because of fierce competition, they turned to processors.

In 1971, Intel developed the world's first commercial processor, Intel 4004. The processor integrates 2250 transistors on a chip and can process 4bit data with 60,000 operations per second at a frequency of 108KHz.

The emergence of Intel 4004Intel 4004 marks the beginning of the era of microprocessors.

In 1974, Intel launched Intel 8080, which has 20 times the performance of 4004.

Intel 8080Intel 8080 is no less significant than 4004 because it is a microprocessor developed for personal computers. MITS's classic microcomputer Altair 8800, launched in 1974, is based on a 8080 processor.

Altair 8800Altair 8800 has attracted wide attention of computer enthusiasts after it was published in the magazine popular Electronics in January 1975. Among them, including a Harvard University Leng teenager, as well as his partner.

Together, they designed Altair BASIC for Altair 8800 and founded a company called Microsoft (Micro Software).

Yes, the name of this Lang Qing is Bill Gates, and his partner is Paul Allen.

Who was the first personal computer Altair 8800 is often referred to as the first personal computer (PC), but in fact, the title is controversial.

In 1971, Kenbak Company of the United States released the Kenbak-1 computer. This computer is considered by the computer History Museum to be the first personal computer in the world.

Kenbak-1 consists of small and medium-sized integrated circuits and does not use microprocessors. The system initially sold for $750 and only about 40 units were made and sold. In 1973, Kenbak closed down and Kenbak-1 stopped production.

In 1973, French company R2E produced the first commercial computer based on microprocessor-Micral. "Micro-computer" is mentioned for the first time in Micral's manual.

Another strong contender for Micral's "first personal computer" is Alto from the Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), a famous Xerox company.

In 1973, they launched Alto (Otto). It was the first computer to use a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI), much like the one we use today. Many of its designs have had a profound impact on Jobs' Apple and Bill Gates' Microsoft.

In 1975, An Wang (WANG) launched the world's first word processor with editing and retrieval functions, beginning to have the embryonic form of a desktop computer. The screen of this computer can display text directly, and the keyboard can quickly modify the manuscript.

In 1977, three classic personal computers were launched, namely, Commodore's Commodore PET, Apple's APPLE II and Tandy Radio Shack's TRS-80 Model II.

The emergence of a large number of personal computers is of great significance.

It has changed the business model of the computer industry, marking that computing power no longer serves only a small number of large enterprises (mainframes), but begins to hold its head high to ordinary families and small and medium-sized enterprises.

Technology Xu Li in addition to processors, computer storage devices and network technology have also made significant progress.

In 1973, IBM invented Winchester (Winchester) hard disk 3340.

The Winchester 3340 disk uses a sealing assembly, a lubricating spindle, and a low-mass head. When working, the magnetic head is suspended above the high-speed rotating disc without direct contact with the disc. This is the prototype of modern hard disk.

In other words, the disk you use today is architecturally not much different from 1973.

In terms of network, in 1970, the prototype ARPAnet of Internet was basically completed.

On May 22, 1973, Robert M. Metcalfe of Xerox's PARC Research Center formally put forward the idea of "Ethernet", which was designed and implemented in November.

Metcalf, 1978, in Vinton G. Cerf, Robert. Thanks to the efforts of Robert E. Kahn and others, TCP / IP was also born.

In the software industry, the achievements of the 1970s are also overwhelming.

In 1973, Ken Thompson (Ken Thomson) and Dennis of Bell Labs. Dennis Ritchie officially published a paper, announced the existence of the UNIX operating system, caused a sensation in the industry, and was regarded as a symbol of the birth of the modern operating system.

Ken Thompson and Dennis, who are operating the DEC PDP-11 computer. In 1970 and 1972, the Forth programming language and the C language were developed respectively.

There has also been a major breakthrough in database technology. In 1970, Edgar Frank Cod (Edgar Frank Codd), a researcher at IBM, ushered in the era of relational databases with a paper called "Relational models for large shared Database data".

The emergence of Edgar Frank Cod relational database laid the foundation for the rapid development of database application.

In 1974, IBM's San Jose Lab launched the IBM System R project, which implemented structured query language (SQL) for the first time.

In 1977, Larry Ellison (Larry Ellison), later known as the IT madman, co-invested $2000 with his partners to form SDL (later Oracle). In 1979, they launched the Oracle database, ushering in a new era of commercial databases.

The co-founder of Oracle has been around for a long time since the 1970s, and many things may have been forgotten.

But in fact, the real start of the IT industry was in the 1970s. The rise of large-scale integrated circuits, the maturity of storage technology, and the emergence of basic software (operating system, database) are all in that period.

The dazzling results, although not very eye-catching now, are all important breakthroughs from 0 to 1.

After the foundation is consolidated, entering 1980, the crazier wave of IT is about to attack.

To be continued.

Please look forward to it-- A brief History of World arithmetic (part two)

References:

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

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

What is the first personal computer in the world? "Oh, a small box, Zhihu

4. "Overview of the Development Generation of Electronic computer", Wu Guofa, Zhihu

5. "IT History Serial-History of computers and personal computers", Internet

6. Wikipedia, Baidu encyclopedia

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

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.