Chapter 394 Computer
When was the "first computer" born? There are various answers, most of which are: the world's first computer is the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, which was born in the United States in 1946.
In fact, there is no standard answer to this question, and ENIAC is just one of the answers. In history, people began to try to make machines that can calculate automatically very early. After years of development, computers have become what they are today. Many types of computers can be regarded as the "first computer", depending on how you define "computer".
If something that can help us do arithmetic can be called a computer, then the ancient abacus should also be called a computer, but it is completely manual.
In the hundreds of years from the 17th to the 20th century, a group of non-electrical computers appeared. These computers had no circuit boards, only a bunch of mechanical gears.
In the 17th century, there was an "all-round superman" in France, Pascal, who was a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, fluid dynamicist, and one of the founders of probability theory. Pascal built a box with a bunch of gears inside, which could be turned as long as the spring was wound up. However, this "first mechanical computer" could only perform simple addition and subtraction operations, and its level was probably only equivalent to that of a kindergarten child.
Later, the German mathematician Leibniz built a mechanical computer that could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operations, and its computing power reached the level of elementary school students. The difference engine built by the British mathematician Babbage in the 1820s could calculate some mathematical functions. Although Babbage dreamed of building a second-generation difference engine with more complete functions, he did not succeed in the end.
Later, people realized that if only mechanical gears were used for calculations, the computing power was extremely limited. If you want to make computers have stronger computing power, you have to find another way. So, electronic computers came into being. Relying on electricity to work faster than relying on gears, so electronic computers have stronger computing power. During World War II, the flight trajectories of aircraft and artillery shells on the battlefield required a lot of complex calculations to obtain, which gave electronic computers a chance to show their skills. Take the world's first large-scale automatic digital computer "Mark 1" as an example. It can store 72 sets of data, each with 23 decimal places. It takes 300 milliseconds to perform an addition operation, 6 seconds to perform a multiplication operation, and 3 seconds to perform a division operation. Although this speed seems slow now, it has achieved a historic breakthrough in computing technology and helped people complete a large number of computing tasks.
So, who is the inventor of the electronic computer? There are also several answers. In 1936, British mathematician Turing first proposed a computer concept that generates output by the interaction of programs and input data. Later generations named this machine the universal Turing machine. In 1938, the first computer "Z-1" that used relays to work appeared, but relays have a mechanical structure and are not completely electronic equipment. In 1942, Atanasoff and Bailey invented the first computer using vacuum tubes, named ABC after the initials of their names. However, ABC can only solve linear equations and cannot do other work. Under Turing's guidance, the first computer "Kolossus" that can write programs to perform different tasks was born in the UK in 1943 and was used for code breaking.
The first modern electronic computer in human history is recognized as ENIAC, which was born at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. Although it was born a while later than the machines mentioned above, it has the main structure and functions of today's computers. It is a general-purpose computer and the first computer equivalent to a general-purpose Turing machine.
It is a behemoth, consisting of 17,468 electron tubes, 60,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and 6,000 switches; it covers an area of 170 square meters, weighs 30 tons, consumes about 150 kilowatts of power, and can perform 5,000 operations per second, which seems insignificant now, but it was unprecedented at the time. ENIAC uses electron tubes as components, so it is also called electron tube computer, which is the first generation of computers. Electron tube computers cannot work for too long because the electron tubes they use are large in size, consume a lot of power, and are prone to heat.
Fortunately, Germany has a technological advantage today, and transistor technology has become increasingly mature and has begun to be used in many devices. Therefore, the first computer in this time and space is an electronic product that is mainly based on transistors and supplemented by electron tubes.
Original time and space Since the 1950s, transistors have gradually replaced vacuum tubes, and eventually achieved mass production of integrated circuits and microprocessors.
At first, transistors and transistorized devices were not popular because they were too expensive. But the US military was very interested because military equipment had special requirements for portability, reliability and durability. For most of the 1950s, it was the support of the military that allowed the young transistor industry to survive.
In 1957, the Soviet satellite "Sputnik" was launched, officially opening the prelude to the US-Soviet space race. In 1961, US President Kennedy announced that "people would be sent to the moon before 1970." Compared with the Soviet Union, the United States' rocket technology was slightly behind, so it was even more necessary to reduce weight, and all electronic equipment used transistors as much as possible. The semiconductor industry based on transistors also made rapid progress. Integrated circuits became the protagonist of this period.
Interestingly, Soviet military electronic equipment in the same period took a completely different path, and for a long time still had a special liking for vacuum tubes. Due to the continuation of the development ideas of simple, mature, reliable and easy-to-produce weapons and equipment in World War II, the Soviet Union believed that vacuum tube technology was mature and easy to make high-power components, so it focused its main efforts on the miniaturization of vacuum tubes. In the choice of analog circuits and digital circuits, Soviet experts also believed that analog circuits were more mature and more suitable for the working characteristics of vacuum tubes, so they vigorously developed analog circuits with operational amplifiers as the core.
Khrushchev also once said that "vacuum tubes have better survival performance under nuclear electromagnetic pulses than transistors. The Soviet Union will not develop transistors in the future and concentrate on miniaturization of electron tubes." Due to policy reasons, the Soviet semiconductor industry has always lagged behind the West, and the quality of the transistors produced has not been up to standard, which eventually formed a vicious cycle and became more and more dependent on vacuum tubes.
By the mid-1970s, Soviet engineers finally discovered that the road to miniaturization of vacuum tubes had come to an end. If the volume of vacuum tubes was reduced by an order of magnitude, the cost would be astronomical. At that time, the integrated circuits developed by Western countries could integrate 140,000 transistors on a 5 square centimeter silicon wafer. The Soviet Union spent ten years proving that the miniaturization of electron tubes could not compare with transistor integrated circuits. In the 1980s, the Soviet electronics industry began to catch up, and before the disintegration, it was able to produce medium-scale integrated circuits, close to the level of the West in the early 1980s.