Research

Welcome to Calypso's Lecture Series for CS-100. The first (and only) lecture in the series is about the history of computing from the past to the present. This offers the student or casual browser an overview of the advances in science that made desktop computers possible starting with the invention of counting.

JOVIAL is a high-order computer programming language similar to ALGOL, but specialized for the development of embedded systems (specialized computer systems designed to perform one or a few dedicated functions, usually embedded as part of a complete device including mechanical parts). JOVIAL is an acronym for "Jules Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language." The "International Algorithmic Language" was a name originally proposed for ALGOL 58. It was developed to compose software for the electronics of military aircraft by Jules Schwartz in 1959.

The UNIVAC 1100/2200 series is a series of compatible 36-bit computer systems, beginning with the UNIVAC 1107 in 1962, initially made by Sperry Rand. The series continues to be supported today by Unisys Corporation as the ClearPath Dorado Series.

UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly and the associated line of computers which continues to this day in one of the two such lines offered by Unisys. Unisys was formed when Burroughs (whose line of computers form the other Unisys mainframe legacy line) bought Sperry which held the evolved UNIVAC division. UNIVAC is an acronym for UNIVersal Automatic Computer.

The UNIVAC LARC (Livermore Advanced Research Computer) was Remington Rand's first attempt at building a supercomputer. It was designed for multiprocessing with 2 CPUs (called Computers) and an Input/output (I/O) Processor (called the Processor).

This is an IBM sales photograph of a large mainframe computer. It has two Central Processing Units (CPU). They are on the left, each is 6ft high (Sorry, 1.8 meters high). They are both connected to the four RAM (Random Access Memory) core storage modules, (only three of which are in the photograph), each containing 256 KByte of storage. The total RAM of this duplex configuration was 1 MByte. (That may not seem much to you now, but then it meant 8 million ferro-magnetic toroids (doughnuts), about the size of a "comma" on your keyboard. Each of which was threaded by three wires.)

The Harvard Mark I Our trip down mainframe lane starts and ends, not so surprisingly, with IBM. Back in the 1930s, when a computer was actually a fellow with a slide rule who did computations for you, IBM was mainly known for its punched-card machines. However, the transformation of IBM from one of the many sellers of business machines to the company that later became a computer monopoly was due in large part to forward-looking leadership, at that time going by the name of Thomas Watson

A mainframe (also known as "big iron") is a high-performance computer used for large-scale computing purposes that require greater availability and security than a smaller-scale machine can offer. Historically, mainframes have been associated with centralized rather than distributed computing, although that distinction is blurring as smaller computers become more powerful and mainframes become more multi-purpose. Today, IBM emphasizes that their mainframes can be used to serve distributed users and smaller servers in a computing network.

IBM 709 The last of IBM's first generation of big scientific vacuum tube computers, this machine was built in 1959. It was the first computer with data channels for IO. This picture shows the Central Processing Unit, which can be opened up like a book to access the wiring. The complete system consists of seven different units including memory, data channels and power supplies plus a card reader, printer and many tape drives. The entire system originally cost $2.5 million. Large corporations, government labs and big universities would have one or two for the entire institution.

An overview featuring representative samples of computers through history