Tom's Hardware and Que Publishing are partnering up to give you four chapters from Scott Mueller's Upgrading And Repairing PCs, 20th Edition. We're also giving away copies of the book to 10 lucky Tom's Hardware readers. To enter, please fill out the contest form.
The first chapter we're making available is from the beginning of Scott's book, covering the development of the PC. From the humble beginnings of mechanical adding machines to today's multi-core processors, we recount the events and innovations that took us where we are today and wrap it up with a convenient timetable showing the complete history of the PC!
In the days to come, we'll also present comprehensive looks at Magnetic Storage Principles, Local Area Networking, and Power Supplies.
The First Electronic Computer
A physicist named John V. Atanasoff (with associate Clifford Berry) is officially credited with creating the first true digital electronic computer from 1937 to 1942, while working at Iowa State University. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (called the ABC) was the first to use modern digital switching techniques and vacuum tubes as switches, and it introduced the concepts of binary arithmetic and logic circuits. This was made legally official on October 19, 1973 when, following a lengthy court trial, U.S. Federal Judge Earl R. Larson voided the ENIAC patent of Eckert and Mauchly and named Atanasoff as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer.
Military needs during World War II caused a great thrust forward in the evolution of computers. In 1943, Tommy Flowers completed a secret British code-breaking computer called Colossus, which was used to decode German secret messages. Unfortunately, that work went largely uncredited because Colossus was kept secret until many years after the war.
ENIAC Is Born
Besides code-breaking, systems were needed to calculate weapons trajectory and other military functions.In 1946, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly, and their associates at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania built the first large-scale electronic computer for the military. This machine became known as ENIAC, the Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator.It operated on 10-digit numbers and could multiply two such numbers at the rate of 300 products per second by finding the value of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was about 1000 times faster than the previous generation of electromechanical relay computers.
ENIAC used approximately 18 000 vacuum tubes, occupied 1800 square feet (167 square meters) of floor space, and consumed around 180 000 watts of electrical power. Punched cards served as the input and output; registers served as adders and as quick-access read/write storage.
The executable instructions composing a given program were created via specified wiring and switches that controlled the flow of computations through the machine. As such, ENIAC had to be rewired and switched for each program to be run.
Although Eckert and Mauchly were originally given a patent for the electronic computer, it was later voided and the patent awarded to John Atanasoff for creating the Atanasoff-Berry Computer.
Programs: Change The Software, Not The Hardware
Earlier in 1945, the mathematician John von Neumann demonstrated that a computer could have a simple, fixed physical structure and yet be capable of executing any kind of computation effectively by means of proper programmed control without changes in hardware. In other words, you could change the program without rewiring the system. The stored-program technique, as von Neumann’s ideas are known, became fundamental for future generations of high-speed digital computers and has become universally adopted.
The first generation of modern programmed electronic computers to take advantage of these improvements appeared in 1947.This group of machines included EDVAC and UNIVAC, the first commercially available computers. These computers included, for the first time, the use of true random access memory (RAM) for storing parts of the program and the data that is needed quickly. Typically, they were programmed directly in machine language, although by the mid-1950s progress had been made in several aspects of advanced programming. The standout of the era is the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), which was the first true general-purpose computer designed for both alphabetical and numerical uses. This made the UNIVAC a standard for business, not just science and the military.
It should really read.
2006: Microsoft releases the long-awaited Windows Vista to business users. The PC OEM and consumer market releases would follow in early 2007 and the vast majority of people quickly downgraded back to Windows XP:
lol
i still have my pentium 2 gathering dust on my closet
improvements in technology is AMAZING
why this article? in the whole wide range of PC, why this?
you could have done the second part to the Antiliasing article.
That's still on its way. It's very data-intensive and Don has been plugging away at it.
It should really read.
2006: Microsoft releases the long-awaited Windows Vista to business users. The PC OEM and consumer market releases would follow in early 2007 and the vast majority of people quickly downgraded back to Windows XP:
lol
Where are the illustrations for this rather interesting piece?
That's a mild understatement. In 1975 you could buy a brand new V8 powered Ford Mustang for $4000.
Eh? Apple had to move to Intel because PowerPC was going downhill in 2006, but a there was a time when PowerPC chips were faster than Intel chips.
That's a bold statement considering that the next version of Windows is going to be ARM compatible.
The personal computer isn't going anywhere, but we might see the end of x86 dominance soon.
Also, it was NOT a huge standard. The TRS-80 was at least as important in 1977 and the next few years, and was the best selling computer before the IBM PC came out. Also, don't forget Atari, which was also out there with the Atari 400 and Atari 800, and had very powerful video acceleration technology.
It's not the Apple II wasn't selling, but it wasn't a predominate standard as stated, and had very strong competition. It was basically overpriced junk, with a slow, very annoying processor (which is the basis for ARM's instruction set), annoying video modes, weird floppy disk technology, and a price excessive for what the machine was.
Also, the Pentium II was not basically a Pentium Pro with MMX. It had much more important changes (in retrospect, since MMX didn't matter much). For one, the Pentium Pro ran 16-bit code very poorly, and it was obscenely expensive because of the L2 cache on the processor package. They slowed down the L2 cache with external chips (for the Klamath, Deschutes, and Katmai), but doubled the L1 cache. This cut costs dramatically. Also, the Pentium II was able to run 16-bit code better than the Pentium for the first time.
I think I have the 2nd Ed of that book at home, with ISA ports listed in it.
A free copy would mean I have one that's up-to-date. lolz