Introduction - Computer Busses - page 3

connected by aluminium lines on a silicon-oxide surface layer on a plane of silicon. He then
went on to lead one of the most innovate companies in the world, the Intel Corporation.
After ENIAC, progress was fast in the computer industry and, by 1948, small electronic
computers were being produced in quantity within five years (2000 were in use), in 1961 it
was 10 000, 1970 100 000. IBM, at the time, had a considerable share of the computer mar-
ket. So much so that a complaint was filed against them alleging monopolistic practices in its
computer business, in violation of the Sherman Act. By January 1954, the US District Court
made a final judgment on the complaint against IBM. For this, a 'consent decree' was then
signed by IBM, which placed limitations on how IBM conducts business with respect to
'electronic data processing machines'.
In 1954, the IBM 650 was built and was considered the workhorse of the industry at the
time (which sold about 1000 machines, and used valves). In November 1956, IBM showed
how innovative they were by developing the first hard disk, the RAMAC 305. It was tower-
ing by today's standards, with 50 two-foot diameter platters, giving a total capacity of 5 MB.
Around the same time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced the first transis-
torised computer: the TX-O (Transistorized Experimental computer). Seeing the potential of
the transistor, IBM quickly switched from valves to transistors and, in 1959, they produced
the first commercial transistorised computer. This was the IBM 7090/7094 series, and it
dominated the computer market for years.
Programs written on these mainframe computers were typically either machine code (us-
ing the actual binary language that the computer understood) or using one of the new com-
piled languages, such as COBOL and FORTRAN. FORTRAN was well suited to engineer-
ing and science as it is based around mathematical formulas. COBOL was more suited to
business applications. FORTRAN was developed in 1957 (typically known as FORTRAN
57) and considerably enhanced the development of computer programs, as the program could
be writing in a near-English form, rather than using a binary language. With FORTRAN, the
compiler converts the FORTRAN statements into a form that the computer can understand.
At the time, FORTRAN programs were stored on punch cards, and loaded into a punch-card
reader to be read into the computer. Each punch card had holes punched into them to repre-
sent ASCII characters. Any changes to a program would require a new set of punch cards.
In 1959, IBM built the first commercial transistorised computer named the IBM
7090/7094 series, which dominated the computer market for many years. In 1960, in New
York, IBM went on to develop the first automatic mass-production facility for transistors. In
1963, the Digital Equipment Company (DEC) sold their first minicomputer, to Atomic En-
ergy of Canada. DEC would become the main competitor to IBM, but eventually fail as they
dismissed the growth in the personal computer market.
The second generation of computers started in 1961 when the great innovator, Fairchild
Semiconductor, released the first commercial integrated circuit. In the next two years, sig-
nificant advances were made in the interfaces to computer systems. The first was by Teletype
who produced the Model 33 keyboard and punched-tape terminal. It was a classic design and
was on many of the available systems. The other advance was by Douglas Engelbart who
received a patent for the mouse-pointing device for computers.
The production of transistors increased, and each year brought a significant decrease in
their size. Gordon Moore, in 1964, plotted the growth in the number of transistors that could
be fitted onto a single microchip, and found that the number of transistors that can be fitted
onto an integrated circuit approximately doubles every 18 months. This is now known as
Moore's law, and has been surprisingly accurate ever since. In 1964, Texas Instruments also
received a patent for the integrated circuit.
At the time, there were only three main ways of writing computer programs: machine