EECE116 CHAPTER SUMMARIZED NOTES HISTORY

 The First Generation: Vacuum Tubes

o ENIAC (Electronic Numerical
 The evolution of computers has been
Integrator and Computer)
characterized by increasing processor
 Designed and
speed, decreasing component size,
constructed at the
increasing memory size, and increasing
University of
I/O capacity and speed.
Pennsylvania.
 One factor responsible for the great
 World’s first general
increase in processor speed is the
purpose electronic
shrinking size of the microprocessor
digital computer.
components; this reduces the distance
 A response to US needs
between components and hence come
during WWII.
from the organization of the processor,
 John Mauchly,
including heavy use of pipelining and
professor of electrical
parallel execution techniques and the
engineering, and John
use of speculative execution
Eckert, one of his
techniques. All these techniques are
graduate students,
designed to keep the processor busy as
proposed to build a
much of the tome as possible.
general-purpose
 A critical issue in computer system
computer using vacuum
design is balancing the performance of
tubes for tubes for the
the various elements so that gains in
BRL’s application.
performance in one area are not
 In 1943, the army
handicapped by a lag in other areas. In
accepted this proposal,
particular, processor speed has
and work began on the
increased more rapidly than memory
ENIAC.
access time. A variety of techniques is
 The resulting machine
used to compensate for this mismatch,
was enormous,
including caches, wider data paths from
weighing 30 tons,
memory to processor, and more
occupying 1500 sq ft of
intelligent memory chips.
 floor space, containing switches and plugging
18,000 vacuum tubes. and unplugging cables.
 It consumed 140kW of  It was completed in
power. It was also 1946.
substantially faster than  Its first task was to
any electro-mechanical perform a series of
computer, capable of complex calculations
5000 additions per that were used to help
second. determine the
 Was a decimal rather feasibility of the
than a binary machine. hydrogen bomb.
 Numbers were
presented in decimal
form and arithmetic  THE VON NEUMANN MACHINE

was performed in the o The task if entering and altering

decimal system. programs for the ENIAC was

 Consists of 20 extremely tedious. The

accumulators, each programming process could be

capable of holding a 10- facilitated if the program could

digit decimal number. be represented in a form

 A ring of 10 vacuum suitable for storing in memory

tubes represents each alongside the data.

digit. o A computer could get its

 Only one vacuum tube instructions by reading them

was in the ON state, from memory, and a program

representing one of the could be set or altered by

10 digits. setting the values of a portion

 The major drawback of of memory.

the ENIAC was that it o Stored-program concept

had to be programmed  Usually attributed to

manually by setting the ENIAC designers,
most notably the
 mathematician John
von Neumann, who was
a consultant on the
ENIAC project.
 Alan Turing developed
the idea at about the
same time. The first
publication of the idea
was in a 1945 proposal
by von Neumann for a
new computer, the
EDVAC (Electronic
Discrete Variable
Computer).
o In 1946, von Neumann and his
colleagues began the design of
a new stored-program
computer, referred to as the
IAS computer, at the Princeton
Institute for Advanced Studies.
o The IAS computer, although not
completed until 1952, is the
prototype of all subsequent
general-purpose computers.