Research

The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a "fifth generation computer" (see History of computing hardware) which was supposed to perform much calculation using massive parallel processing. It was to be the end result of a massive government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and to provide a platform for future developments in artificial intelligence.

Each generation of computer is characterized by a major technological development that fundamentally changed the way computers operate, resulting in increasingly smaller, cheaper, more powerful and more efficient and reliable devices.

Computers truly came into their own as great inventions in the last two decades of the 20th century. But their history stretches back more than 2500 years to the abacus: a simple calculator made from beads and wires, which is still used in some parts of the world today. The difference between an ancient abacus and a modern computer seems vast, but the principle—making repeated calculations more quickly than the human brain—is exactly the same.

Some people may believe that 20th and 21st century physics research has less of a direct impact on their daily lives than biology, chemistry, engineering, and other fields. Perhaps they think of physics as an abstract, enigmatic, or purely academic endeavor. Others think that physics only contributes to national defense and medical imaging. I created this page to dispel those myths. Nearly everyone would agree that the computer, the transistor, and the World Wide Web are among the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Economists and laymen alike know that today's entire world economy is inextricably linked to these technologies. The daily lives of a large fraction of Earth's inhabitants would be substantially different were it not for their inventions. Most would agree that America's preeminence in computer and information technology is at least partly responsible for its status as an "economic superpower." The wealth of other nations such as Japan, Taiwan, countries in Western Europe, and others is also due, in part, to their embracement of, and contributions to, the information age.

Only once in a lifetime will a new invention come about to touch every aspect of our lives. Such a device that changes the way we work, live, and play is a special one, indeed. A machine that has done all this and more now exists in nearly every business in the U.S. and one out of every two households (Hall, 156). This incredible invention is the computer. The electronic computer has been around for over a half-century, but its ancestors have been around for 2000 years. However, only in the last 40 years has it changed the American society. From the first wooden abacus to the latest high-speed microprocessor, the computer has changed nearly every aspect of people's lives for the better.The very earliest existence of the modern day computer's ancestor is the abacus. These date back to almost 2000 years ago. It is simply a wooden rack holding parallel wires on which beads are strung. When these beads are moved along the wire according to "programming" rules that the user must memorize, all ordinary arithmetic operations can be performed (Soma, 14).

Ada Byron was the daughter of a brief marriage between the Romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, who separated from Byron just a month after Ada was born. Four months later, Byron left England forever. Ada never met her father (who died in Greece in 1823) and was raised by her mother, Lady Byron. Her life was an apotheosis of struggle between emotion and reason, subjectivism and objectivism, poetics and mathematics, ill health and bursts of energy.

This page summarizes pretty much everything relating to Apple in the past 3 decades (including historical events of IBM, Microsoft, and NeXT) in choronological order with fairly accurate dates. For more information do yourself a favor and read Owen Linzmayer's excellent Mac Bathroom Reader, with detailed accounts of all the events mentioned below from the people who actually experienced it.

The Idea that Changed the World. The creation of the modern computer has changed the face of the planet. Today, there are more devices fitted with a microchip than there are human beings. The idea of a “computer” cannot be attributed to a single person. Rather, it has been the combined contribution of many innovative and forward-thinking scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and engineers that has brought us to what we now refer to as “the computer age”. This is their story…

The evolution of the first recognizably modern computers in the 1940&'s and early 1950&'s is an epic story of innovation, collaboration, secrecy, and a technological phoenix built from the ashes of World War II. The development of The von Neumann Architecture, from concept, to ultimate practical realization lasted a few years, a decade, or a century depending on how you interpret the facts. The characters, places, and machines, in this story are legend; Babbage, Lovelace and the Analytical engine, Atanasoff’s ABC, Aiken and the Harvard Mk1, Zuse’s Z1 through Z4, Vannevar Bush, John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, John von Neumann, the ENIAC and EDVAC. Tommy Flowers the Heath Robinson and Collossus at Bletchley Park. TRE Malvern, Manchester University, the Baby and the Williams-Kilburn tube, Lyons tea shops and the EDSAC at Cambridge and the CSIRAC. My goal is not to catalog these efforts but rather to show the links between them and the web of collaboration that led to the evolution of the first modern computer.

What is a Computer? The machine which is sitting in front of you. The machine which can draw graphics, set up your modem, decipher your PGP, do typography, refresh your screen, monitor your keyboard, manage the performance of all these in synchrony... and do all of these through a single principle: reading programs placed in its storage.