Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
2012 Intel releases the third-generation Core i-Series processors (Ivy Bridge) and complementing
Panther Point 7-Series chipsets. Noted advancements include integrated USB 3.0 support, PCI
Express 3.0 support, and Tri-Gate transistor technology.
2012 AMD releases socket AM3+ FX-8000, FX-6000, and FX-4000 series eight, six, and four-core
processors, as well as the “Trinity” accelerated processing unit.
2012 Microsoft releases Windows 8, featuring touch-screen input, including a version supporting
ARM processors, used in mobile phone and tablet/pad devices.
2012 Microsoft releases its Surface tablet, available in an Intel processor-based version with
Windows 8 Pro and an ARM processor-based version with Windows RT.
Electronic Computers
A physicist named John V. Atanasoff (with associate Clifford Berry) is officially credited with
creating the first true digital electronic computer from 1937 to 1942, while working at Iowa State
University. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (called the ABC) was the first to use modern digital
switching techniques and vacuum tubes as switches, and it introduced the concepts of binary
arithmetic and logic circuits. This was made legally official on October 19, 1973 when, following a
lengthy court trial, U.S. Federal Judge Earl R. Larson voided the ENIAC patent of Eckert and
Mauchly and named Atanasoff as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer.
Military needs during World War II caused a great thrust forward in the evolution of computers. In
1943, Tommy Flowers completed a secret British code-breaking computer called Colossus, which
was used to decode German secret messages. Unfortunately, that work went largely uncredited
because Colossus was kept secret until many years after the war.
Besides code-breaking, systems were needed to calculate weapons trajectory and other military
functions. In 1946, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly, and their associates at the Moore School of
Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania built the first large-scale electronic computer
for the military. This machine became known as ENIAC, the Electrical Numerical Integrator and
Calculator. It operated on 10-digit numbers and could multiply two such numbers at the rate of 300
products per second by finding the value of each product from a multiplication table stored in its
memory. ENIAC was about 1,000 times faster than the previous generation of electromechanical
relay computers.
ENIAC used approximately 18,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 1,800 square feet (167 square meters) of
floor space, and consumed around 180,000 watts of electrical power. Punched cards served as the
input and output; registers served as adders and as quick-access read/write storage.
The executable instructions composing a given program were created via specified wiring and
switches that controlled the flow of computations through the machine. As such, ENIAC had to be
rewired and switched for each program to be run.
Although Eckert and Mauchly were originally given a patent for the electronic computer, it was later
voided and the patent awarded to John Atanasoff for creating the Atanasoff-Berry Computer.
Earlier in 1945, the mathematician John von Neumann demonstrated that a computer could have a
simple, fixed physical structure and yet be capable of executing any kind of computation effectively
by means of proper programmed control without changes in hardware. In other words, you could
change the program without rewiring the system. The
stored-program technique
, as von Neumann's
ideas are known, became fundamental for future generations of high-speed digital computers and has
