World Wide Web 1989

“CERN is a meeting place for physicists from all over the world, who collaborate on complex physics, engineering and information handling projects. Thus, the need for the WWW system arose from the geographical dispersion of large collaboration, and the fast turnover of fellows, students, and visiting scientists who had to get up to speed on projects and leave a lasting contribution before leaving “CERN possessed both the financial and computing resources necessary to start the project. In the original proposal, Berners-Leeoutlined two phases of the project

First CERN would make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user’s workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Second they would extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material.

Burners-Lee expected each phase to take three months with the full manpower complement he was asking for four software engineers and a programmer. The proposal talked about a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine stored information already available at CERN. Set off in 1989, the WWW quickly gained great popularity among internet users. For instance, at 11:22 am of April 12, 1995, the WWW server at the SEAS of the University of Pennsylvania responded to 128 requests in one minute between 10:00 and 11:00

Transistor 1947

The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley. This was perhaps the most important electronics event of the 20th century, as it later made possible the integrated circuit and microprocessor that are the basis of modern electronics. Prior to the transistor the only alternative to its current regulation and switching function (transfer resistor was the vacuum tubes, which could only be miniaturized to a certain extent, and wasted a lot of energy in the form of heat.

Compared to vacuum tubes, it offered

• Smaller size 
• Better reliability 
• Lower power consumption 
• Lower cost

Quantum Computing with Molecules

by Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang

Factoring a number with 400 digits a numeric al feat needed to break some security codes would take even the fastest super computer in existence billions of years, but a newly conceived type of computer, one that exploits quantum-mechanical interaction, might complete the task in a year or so. Thereby defeating many of the most sophisticated encryption schemes in use sensitive data are safe for the time being, because no one has been able to build a practical quantum computer. But researchers have now demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. Such a computer would look nothing like the machine that sits on your desk surprisingly it might resemble the c up of coffee at its side. Several reseach groups believe quantum computers based on the molecules in a liquid might one day over come many of the limits facing conventional computer. Roadblocks to improving conventional computers will ultimately arise from the fundamental physical bounds to miniaturization (for example because transistors and electrical wiring cannot be made slimmer than the width of an atom). Or they may come about for practical reasons most likely because the facilities for fabricating still more powerful microchips will become prohibitively expensive. Yet the magic of quantum mechanics might solve both these problems.

Cray 1 1976

It looked like no other computer before, or for that matter, since. The Cray 1 was the world’s supercomputer a machine that leapfrogged existing technology when it was introduced in 1971. And back then, you couldn't just order up fast processors from Intel. There weren't any microprocessor. Sys Gwen Bell of the computer museum history centre. There individual integrated circuits that are on the board performed different function. Each Cray 1, like this one at the computer museum history centre, took months to build. The hundreds of boards and thousands of wires had to fit just right. It was really a hand-crafted machine adds bell you think of all these wires as a kind of mess but each one has a precise length.

Intel 4004 1971

The 4004 was the world’s first universal microprocessor. In the late 1960, many scientists had discussed the possibility of a computer on a chip, but nearly everyone felt that integrated circuit technology was not yet ready to support such a chip. Intel’s Ted Hoff felt differently he was the first person to recognize that the new silicon-gated MOS technology might make a single chip CPU (central processing unit) possible.

Hoff and the Intel team developed such architecture with just over 2,300 transistors in an area of only 3 by 4 millimeters. With its 4-bit CPU, command resister, decoder, decoding control, control monitoring of machine commands and interim register, the 4004 was one heck of a little invention. Today’s 64-bit microprocessors are still based on similar designs, and the microprocessor is still the most complex mass produced product ever with more than 5.5 million transistors performing hundreds of millions of calculations each second numbers that are sure to be outdated fast.

Compiler 1952

Grace Murray Hopper an employee of Remington tends worked on the NUIVAC. She took up the concept of reusable software in her 1952 paper entitled “The Education of a computer” and developed the first software that could translate symbols of higher computer languages into machine language (Compiler)

UNIVAC-1 1951

UNIVAC-1 the first commercially successful electronic computer UNIVAC 1, was also the first general purpose computer designed to handle both numeric and textual information. It was designed by J.Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The implementation of the machine marked the real beginning of the computer era. Remington Rand delivered the first UNIVAC machine to the U.S. bureau of census in 1951. This machine used magnetic tape for input

• First successful commercial computer
• Design was derived from the ENIAC (same developers)
• Firs client=U.S bureau of the census 
• $1 million 
• 48 systems built

Floppy Disk 1950

Invented at the imperial university in Tokyo by Yoshiro Nakamats.

Harvard Mark 1-1943

Howard akin and grace hopper designed the mark series of computers at Harvard university the mark series of computers began with the mark 1 in 1944. Imagine a giant room full of noisy clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and 8 feet high. The 5-ton device contained almost 760, 000 separate pieces. Used by the US navy for gunnery and ballistic calculation, the mark 1 was in operation until 1959.

The computer, controlled by pre-punched paper tape, could carry out addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and reference to previous results. It had special subroutines for logarithms and trigonometric functions and used 23 decimal place numbers. Data was stored and c counted mechanically using 3000 decimal storage wheels, 1400 rotary dial switches, and 500 miles of wire. Its electromagnetic relays classified the machine as a relay computer. All output was displayed on an electric typewriter. By today’s standards, the mark 1 was slow, requiring 3-5 seconds for a multiplication operation.

ABC 1939

The Atanasoff Berry computer was the world’s first electronic digital computer. It was built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford berry at Lowa state university during 1937-42. It incorporated several major innovations in computing including the use of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, parallel processing, and separation of memory and computing function.

Vacuum Tube 1904

A vacuum tube is just that a glass tube surrounding a vacuum an area from which (all gases has been removed). What makes it interesting is that when electrical contacts are put on the ends, you can get a current to flow though that vacuums. A British scientist named John A. Fleming made a vacuum tube known today as a diode. Then the diode was known as a “valve”

The Turing Test

A test proposed to determine if a computer has the ability to think in 1950, Alan Turing (Turing 1950) proposed a method for determining if machines can think. This method is known as the Turing Test. The test is conducted with two people and a machine. One person plays the role of an interrogator and is in a separate room the machine and the other person. The interrogator only knows the person and machine as A and B. The interrogator does not know which the person is and which the machine is. Using a Teletype, the interrogator, can ask A and B any question he/she wishes. The aim of the interrogator is to determine which the person is and which the machine is. The aim of the machine is to fool the interrogator into thinking that it is a person if the machine succeeds then we can conclude that machines can think.

Turing machine 1936

Introduced by Alan Turing in 1936, Turing machines are one of the key abstractions used in modern computability theory, the study of what computers can and cannot do. A Turing machine is a particularly simple kind of computer, one whose operations are limited to reading and writing symbols on a tape, or moving along the tape to the left or right. The tape is marked off into squares, each of which can be filled with at most one symbol. At any given point in its operation, the Turing machine can only read or write on one of these squares, the square located directly below its “read/write” head.