First generation of computers

The first generation of computers ranges from the year 1946 to the year 1956, although really these dates are from the commercial machines that could be called the first generation of computers.

Features:

• They were built with vacuum valve electronics.
• They were programmed in machine language.
• The information was shown in light bulbs, each bulb is a bit, if it was 1 it was lit and if it was 0 it was turned off.

A program is a set of instructions for a machine to do some task, and the simplest language in which it can be specified, the program is called a machine language because the program must be written using some set of binary code.

The first generation of computers and its predecessors are described in the following list of the main models that it consisted of:

• 1938 the first fully electro-mechanical Z1 machine, the mechanical components gave a lot of problems. The Zs were manufactured by German Konrad Zuse, whose work was despised for having occurred in Germany during the Second World War.
• 1939 the Z2, to improve used relays for the first time, was an intermediate machine between the Z1 and the Z3.
• 1941 the Z3, first machine fully operational using relays.
• 1944. Considered until a few years ago as the first electronic digital computer in history. It was not a production model, but an experimental machine. Nor was it programmable in the current sense. It was a huge apparatus that occupied a whole basement in college. Built with 18,000 vacuum tubes, it consumed several kW of electrical power and weighed 30 tons. He was able to make five thousand sums per second. It was made by a team of engineers and scientists led by doctors John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
• 1950 the Z4 was completed, completely redesigned after losing the plans and pieces of the previous Z during the allied bombings of Berlin. It was the first machine to be sold commercially in 1950.
• 1951 EDVAC. Second programmable computer. It was also a laboratory prototype, but it already included in its design the central ideas that make up the current computers.
• 1951 UNIVAC I. Considered the first commercial computer to be sold, although it was advanced by the British Feranti Mark I for a few months, and it never took into account the Z4 that came forward almost a year. Doctors Mauchly and Eckert founded the Universal Computer Company (Univac), and their first product was this machine. The first client was the United States Census Office.
• 1953 IBM 701. To enter the data, these teams used punched cards, which had been invented in the years of the industrial revolution (ends of the 18th century) by the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard and perfected by the American Herman Hollerith in 1890. IBM 701 was the first in a long series of computers of this company, which would later become number one, for its sales volume.
• 1954 - IBM continued with other models, incorporating a mass storage mechanism called magnetic drum, which would evolve over the years and become the magnetic disk.
• 1955 - Zuse Z22. Konrad Zuse's first computer using vacuum tubes.

The vacuum valve and computers

The era of modern computing began with a flurry of development before and during World War II, as electronic circuits, relays, capacitors, and vacuum tubes replaced mechanical equivalents, and digital computations replaced analog computations.

The computers that were designed and built back then are sometimes called "first generation" of computers. The first generation of computers were usually built by hand using circuitry containing relays and vacuum tubes, and often used punched cards or punched paper tape. i>) for data input [input] and as a primary (non-volatile) storage medium. Temporary storage was provided by acoustic delay lines (which use the propagation of sound time on a medium such as wire to store data) or by William tubes (which use the ability of a television tube to store and retrieve data).

Throughout 1943, magnetic core memory was rapidly displacing most other forms of temporary storage, and it dominated the field by the mid-1970s.

In 1936 Konrad Zuse began construction of the first Z series, calculators that offered memory (initially limited) and programmability. The purely mechanical, but already binary Zuses, the Z1 completed in 1938 never worked reliably due to problems with part accuracy. In 1937, Claude Shannon did his master's thesis at MIT which implemented Boolean algebra using electronic relays and switches for the first time in history. Entitled "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switch Circuits" (A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits), Shannon's thesis essentially founded practical digital circuit design.

Zuse's subsequent machine, the Z3, was completed in 1941. It was based on telephone relays and worked satisfactorily. Thus, the Z3 was the first functional computer controlled by programs. In many of its features it was quite similar to modern machines, opening up numerous advances, such as the use of binary arithmetic and floating point numbers. The hard work of replacing the decimal system (used in Charles Babbage's early design) with the simpler binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at the time.

This is sometimes seen as the main reason why Zuse succeeded where Babbage failed; however, while most general-purpose machines today continue to execute binary instructions, decimal arithmetic is still essential for business, financial, scientific, and entertainment applications, and decimal floating-point hardware is being added into devices. (the binary system continues to be used for addressing on almost all machines) as a support for binary hardware.

Programs for the Z3 were made on punched tapes. Conditional jumps were strange, but since the 1990s theoretical purists said the Z3 was still a universal computer (ignoring its physical storage size limitations). In two 1937 patents, Konrad Zuse also anticipated that machine instructions could be stored in the same type of storage used for data—the key vision that became known as the von Neumann architecture and was first implemented in the computer. British design EDSAC (1949) later–.

Zuse also designed the first high-level programming language Plankalkül in 1945, although it was never formally published until 1971, and was first implemented in 2000 by the University of Berlin, five years later. after Zuse's death.

Zuse suffered dramatic setbacks and lost many years during World War II when British or American bombers destroyed his early machines. Apparently his work remained largely unknown to engineers in the United Kingdom and the United States. Even so, IBM was aware of this and financed his company early in the postwar period in 1946 to obtain rights to Zuse's patents.

In 1940, the Complex Number Calculator, a relay-based calculator for complex arithmetic, was completed. It was the first machine that was ever used remotely over a telephone line. In 1938, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC), a special-purpose computer for solving systems of linear equations, which used capacitors mechanically mounted on a rotating drum for memory.. The ABC machine was not programmable, although it is considered a computer in the modern sense in several other respects.

During World War II, the British made significant efforts at Bletchley Park to decipher German military communications. The German cypher system (Enigma), was attacked with the help of building bombs (designed after the electromechanical programmable bombs) which helped find possible Enigma keys after other techniques had narrowed down the possibilities. The Germans also developed a series of cypher systems (called Fish cyphers by the British and Lorenz cypers by the Germans) that were quite different from the Enigma. As part of an attack against them, Professor Max Newman and his colleagues (including Alan Turing) built the Colossus. The Mk I Colossus was built on very short notice by Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station on Dollis Hill in London and shipped to Bletchley Park.

The Colossus was the first fully electronic computing device. The Colossus used only vacuum tubes and had no relays. It had input for paper-tape and was able to do conditional branches. Nine Mk II Colossi were built (the Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in all). Details of its existence, design, and use were kept secret until the 1970s. Winston Churchill is said to have personally issued an order for its destruction into pieces no larger than a man's hand. Due to this secret the Colossi has not been included in many computing histories. A reconstructed copy of one of the Colossus machines is now on display at Bletchley Park.

Turing's pre-war work had a major influence on theoretical computer science, and after the war, he designed, built and programmed some of the first computers at the National Physical Laboratory and at the University of Manchester. His 1936 paper included a restatement of Kurt Gödel's 1931 results as well as a description of what is now known as the Turing machine, a purely theoretical device for formalizing the notion of algorithm execution, superseding the universal language, more embarrassing, from Gödel based on arithmetic. Modern computers are Turing-integrated (algorithm execution capacity equivalent to a universal Turing machine), except for their finite memory. This limited type of Turing-embedding is sometimes seen as a threshold capability separating general-purpose computers from their special-purpose predecessors.

George Stibitz and his colleagues at Bell Laboratories in New York City produced some relay-based computers in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but they were more concerned with control problems of the telephone system., not in computing. His efforts, however, were a clear precedent for another American electromechanical machine.

The Harvard Mark I (officially called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) was a general-purpose electro-mechanical computer built with funding from IBM and with assistance from some IBM staff under the direction of Harvard mathematician Howard Aiken. Its design was influenced by the Analytical Engine. It was a decimal machine that used storage wheels and rotary switches in addition to electromagnetic relays.

It was programmed using perforated paper tape, and contained several calculators working in parallel. Later models would contain multiple paper tape readers and the machine could switch between readers based on a condition. Still, this doesn't make much of the Turing-integrated machine. Development began in 1939 at IBM's Endicott Laboratories; the Mark I was brought to Harvard University for commissioning in May 1944.

ENIAC

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) built in the United States, often called the first general-purpose electronic computer, publicly validated the use of electronic elements for large-scale computing. This was crucial to the development of modern computing, initially because of its high speed advantage, but ultimately because of the potential for miniaturization.

Built under the direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, it was a thousand times faster than its contemporaries. Development and construction of the ENIAC began in 1941 and it was fully operational by the end of 1945. When its design was proposed, many researchers believed that the thousands of delicate valves (vacuum tubes) would often burn out, implying that the ENIAC was very often under repair. It was, however, capable of more than 100,000 simple calculations per second, and that was for a few hours, which was the time between valve failures.

To program the ENIAC, however, you had to rewire it, so some say that this can't even qualify as programming, since any kind of reconstruction of a computer should be considered programming. Several years later, however, it became possible to execute programs stored in function table memory.

All machines of this era lacked what would become known as the Eckert-Mauchly architecture: their programs were not stored in the same "space" memory as data and thus programs could not be manipulated as data.

The first Eckert-Mauchly machines were the Manchester Baby or Small-Scale Experimental Machine, built at the University of Manchester in 1948; this was followed in 1949 by the Manchester Mark I computer which ran as a complete system using William's tube for memory, and also introduced index registers. The other contender for the title "first stored-program digital computer" was EDSAC, designed and built at the University of Cambridge.

It was operational less than a year after the Manchester "Baby" and was able to solve real problems. EDSAC was actually inspired by plans for EDVAC, the successor to ENIAC; these plans were already in place by the time ENIAC was successfully operational. Unlike ENIAC, which used parallel processing, EDVAC used a single processing unit. This design was simpler and was the first to be implemented in each wave, succeeding in miniaturization, and increased reliability. The Manchester Mark I/EDSAC/EDVAC is seen by some as the "Evas" from which almost all current computers derive from its architecture.

The first programmable computer in continental Europe was created by a team of scientists under the direction of Segrey Alekseevich Lebedev of the Institute of Electrotechnology in kyiv, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). The MESM (Small Electronic Calculating Machine (МЭСМ)) computer was operational in 1950. It had approximately 6000 vacuum tubes and consumed 25 kW. It could perform approximately 3000 operations per second.

The Manchester University machine became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark I. The first Ferranti Mark I machine was delivered to the University in February 1951 and at least nine others were sold between 1951 and 1957.

UNIVAC I

In June 1951, the UNIVAC I [Universal Automatic Computer] was delivered to the US Census Bureau. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine was mistakenly called the "IBM UNIVAC". Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines for more than a million dollars each. The UNIVAC was the first "mass-produced" computer; all the predecessors had been "one out of " the units. It used 5,200 vacuum tubes and consumed 125 kW. It used a mercury delay line capable of storing 1000 words of 11 decimal digits plus signal (72-bit words) for memory. With the first machines he did not use a punch card system, but a metal tape input.

LEO

In November 1952, the company J. Lyons and Co. (related to the food industry) developed the first computer in England, the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office), this was also the first computer to solve business problems.