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IS&T 2410: Information Systems ArchitectureFall 2009Due: Sep. 28 (Monday)Assignment #1 (10 points):Complete the following two research questions, and write up a report (2-4 pages), including the references:1. Investigate the history of computing machines from the 1800 to 1950. Identify three computer prototypes developed between 1800 and 1900. In addition, identify three electronic computers developed between 1900 and 1950. Do these machines share any features? If so, what are they? What are the main differences between the machines in group 1 and those in group 2?1800–1899In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar of Philippines created the first Arithmometer. This was the first mass produced calculator. This calculator could do multiplication and some division with the aid of the user. This was the most reliable calculator to date. This machine was generally large enough to occupy most of a desktop.
Babbage was a great engineer in the computer / calculator industry. He invented most of he new machine in the early 1800’s his first design was with Joseph Clement in 1832. They produced a prototype segment of Babbage’s difference engine, which operated on 6-digit numbers and second-order differences. The design for the machinge would have filled a whole romm. Unfortunately it never made it into production and only a prototype was made.
In 1834 Babbage conceives his decimal 'Analytical Engine'. This is a program that used punch cards on read-only-memory. The machine was never built but would have operated on 40-digit numbers. The main processor or the 'mill' would have had 2 main accumulators. The memory or the 'store' would have held a thousand 50-digit numbers. This machine would have been able to do addition in 3 seconds and multiplication in 2-4 minutes. This machine was also never built.
In 1847 Babbage continued to work on his difference engine. He completed a new design that was more advanced and simpler. This machine was also never built but was built in the late 1900’s in London to test the idea. It was very successful.
In 1878 Ramon Verea, Created a caluculator with internal multiplication tables. This was a big advancement in CPU technology.
After Babbages death many believed that his plan could never be built with out him. This was a great loss in computer history.
In 1890 Herman Hollerith designed and built the first tabulating machine. His company was later to become IBM. The founding company for computers. He invented a way for data to be recorded on a medium that could be read by a machine. This was done on a punch card.
In 1931 Charles Wynn-Williams used thyratron tubes to construct a binary digital counter for use in connection with physics experiments.
1936 Alan Turing published a paper on 'computable numbers which reformulates Kurt Gödel's results. His paper addressed the famous 'Entscheidungsproblem' whose solution was sought in the paper by reasoning (as a mathematical device) about a simple and theoretical, computer known today as a Turing machine. In many ways, this device was more convenient than Gödel's arithmetics-based universal formal system.1937 George Stibitz invented the one of the 1st 1-bit binary adder using relays. He was from the Bell Telephone Laboratories. At this point in development it was only a prototype and many other improvements are to fallow.
1938 Konrad Zuse made the first 'Z1', a mechanical binary programmable computer. It used the Boolean Algebra and had most of the basic components of modern machines. Zuse's lead to a 'von Neumann' architecture with program and data modifiable in storage. It worked with floating point numbers (7-bit exponent, 16-bit mantissa, and sign bit). The memory used sliding metal parts to store 16 such numbers. The arithmetic unit was less successful, occasionally suffering from certain mechanical engineering problems. The program was read from holes punched in discarded 35 mm movie film. Data values could have been entered from a numeric keyboard, and outputs were displayed on electric lamps.
Many of the machines developed in the 1900’s were using technology that was invented in the 1800’s. It is strangly simpalar how they all seemed to use some sort of puch system for read memory. It wasn’t till late 1900’s that they were able to develop a better human interface system of receiving data. Most of the computers used moving parts to get from one process to another. It is incredible to journey technology went through to reach where it is today. It was very evident that lots of people had great ideas but were unable to build their inventions due to financing. If they had been there would have been a faster movement in technology.

2. Research the term Von Neumann architecture (or machine). Provide a description for this term, as well as a simple diagram illustrating the relationship among the basic parts. Identify the first microprocessor. What key technology made the microprocessor possible? What roles did the microprocessor play in the development of the PC (personal computer)?
The von Neumann architecture is a design model for a stored-program digital computer that uses a processing unit and a single separate storage structure to hold both instructions and data. It is named after the mathematician and early computer scientist John von Neumann. Such computers implement a universal Turing machine and have a sequential architecture.A stored-program digital computer is one that keeps its programmed instructions, as well as its data, in read-write, random-access memory (RAM). Stored-program computers were advancement over the program-controlled computers of the 1940s, such as the Colossus and the ENIAC, which were programmed by setting switches and inserting patch leads to route data and to control signals between various functional units. In the vast majority of modern computers, the same memory is used for both data and program instructions.The terms "von Neumann architecture" and "stored-program computer" are generally used interchangeably, and that usage is followed in this article. In contrast, the Harvard architecture stores a program in a modifiable form, but without using the same physical storage or format for general data.

IS&T 2410: Information Systems Architecture
Fall 2009
Due: Sep. 28 (Monday)

Assignment #1 (10 points):

Complete the following two research questions, and write up a report (2-4 pages), including the references:

1. Investigate the history of computing machines from the 1800 to 1950. Identify three computer prototypes developed between 1800 and 1900. In addition, identify three electronic computers developed between 1900 and 1950. Do these machines share any features? If so, what are they? What are the main differences between the machines in group 1 and those in group 2?

2. Research the term Von Neumann architecture (or machine). Provide a description for this term, as well as a simple diagram illustrating the relationship among the basic parts. Identify the first microprocessor. What key technology made the microprocessor possible? What roles did the microprocessor play in the development of the PC (personal computer)?

Penalty:
Late submission – 10 % per day.
Writing by hand – 2 points
Plagiarism and cases of copying/cheating are reported for disciplinary action and an 'F' grade will be awarded to those involved.

1800–1899
Date
Place
Event
1801

Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed an automatic loom controlled by punched cards.
1820

Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar of Philippines, made his 'Arithmometer' - the first mass-produced calculator. It did multiplication using the same general approach as Leibniz's calculator; with assistance from the user it can also do division. It was also the most reliable calculator to date. Machines of this general design, large enough to occupy most of a desktop, continued to be sold for about 90 years.
1822

Charles Babbage designed his first mechanical computer, the first prototype of the decimal difference engine for tabulating polynomials.
1832

Babbage and Joseph Clement produced a prototype segment of his difference engine, which operated on 6-digit numbers and second-order differences (i.e., it could tabulate quadratic polynomials). The complete engine, which would have been room-sized, was planned to operate both on sixth-order differences with numbers of about 20 digits, and on third-order differences with numbers of 30 digits. Each addition would have been done in two phases, the second one taking care of any carries generated in the first. The output digits were to be punched into a soft metal plate, from which a printing plate might have been made. But there were various difficulties, and no more than this prototype piece was ever finished.
1834

Babbage conceives, and begins to design, his decimal 'Analytical Engine'. A program for it was to be stored on read-only memory, in the form of punch cards. Babbage continued to work on the design for years, though after about 1840 design changes seem to have been minor. The machine would have operated on 40-digit numbers; the 'mill' (CPU) would have had 2 main accumulators and some auxiliary ones for specific purposes, while the 'store' (memory) would have held a thousand 50-digit numbers. There would have been several punch card readers, for both programs and data; the cards were to be chained and the motion of each chain reversible. The machine would have performed conditional jumps. There would also have been a form of microcoding: the meaning of instructions were to depend on the positioning of metal studs in a slotted barrel, called the "control barrel". The machine envisioned would have been capable of an addition in 3 seconds and a multiplication or division in 2-4 minutes. It was to be powered by a steam engine. In the end, no more than a few parts were actually built.
1835

Joseph Henry invented the electromechanical relay.
1842

Babbage's difference engine project cancelled as an official project. The cost overruns had been considerable, and Babbage had changed his focus to the more ambitious Analytical Engine.
1843

Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard produced a third-order difference engine with printer; the Swedish government agrees to fund their next development.
1847

Babbage designed an improved, simpler difference engine (the Difference Engine No.2), a project which took 2 years. The machine would have operated on 7th-order differences and 31-digit numbers, but nobody was found to pay to have it built. In 1989-1991 a team at London's Science Museum did build one from the surviving plans. They built components using modern methods, but with tolerances no better than Clement could have provided... and, after a bit of tinkering and detail-debugging, they found that the machine works properly. In 2000, the printer was also completed.
1848

British Mathematician George Boole developed binary algebra (Boolean algebra) which has been widely used in binary computer design and operation, beginning about a century later. See 1939.
1853

To Babbage's delight, the Scheutzes completed the first full-scale difference engine, which they called a Tabulating Machine. It operated on 15-digit numbers and 4th-order differences, and produced printed output just as Babbage's would have. A second machine was later built to the same design by the firm of Bryan Donkin of London.
1858

The first Tabulating Machine (see 1853) was bought by the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, and the second by the British government. The Albany machine was used to produce a set of astronomical tables; but the Observatory's director was fired for this extravagant purchase, and the machine never seriously used again, eventually ending up in a museum. The second machine had a long and useful life.
1869

The first practical logic machine was built by William Stanley Jevons.
1871

Babbage produced a prototype section of the Analytical Engine's mill and printer.
1875

Martin Wiberg produced a reworked difference-engine-like machine intended to prepare logarithmic tables.
1878

Ramon Verea, living in New York City, invented a calculator with an internal multiplication table; this was much faster than the shifting carriage, or other digital methods of the time. He wasn't interested in putting it into production, however; it seems he just wanted to show that a Spaniard could invent as well as an American.
1879

A committee investigated the feasibility of completing the Analytical Engine, and concluded that it would be impossible now that Babbage was dead. The project was then largely forgotten, except by a very few; Howard Aiken was a notable exception.
1884

Dorr Felt, of Chicago, developed his 'Comptometer'. This was the first calculator in which operands are entered by pressing keys rather than having to be, for example, dialled in. It was feasible because of Felt's invention of a carry mechanism fast enough to act while the keys return from being pressed.
1885

A multiplying calculator more compact than the Arithmometer entered mass production. The design is the independent, and more or less simultaneous, invention of Frank S. Baldwin, of the United States, and Willgodt Theophil Odhner, a Swede living in Russia. Fluted drums were replaced by a "variable-toothed gear" design: a disk with radial pegs that can be made to protrude or retract from it.
1886

Herman Hollerith developed the first version of his tabulating system in the Baltimore Department of Health.
1889

Dorr Felt invented the first printing desk calculator.
1890

The 1880 US census had taken 7 years to complete since all processing had been done by hand from journal sheets. The increasing population suggested that by the 1890 census, data processing would take longer than the 10 years before the next census —so a competition was held to find a better method. It was won by a Census Department employee, Herman Hollerith, who went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company, later to become IBM. He invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine. Prior uses of machine readable media had been for control (Automatons, Piano rolls, looms, ...), not data. "After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards..."[25] His machines used mechanical relays (and solenoids) to increment mechanical counters. This method was used in the 1890 census and the completed results (62,622,250 people) were ... finished months ahead of schedule and far under budget.[26] The inspiration for this invention was Hollerith's observation of railroad conductors during a trip in the western US; they encoded a crude description of the passenger (tall, bald, male) in the way they punched the ticket.
1892

William S. Burroughs of St. Louis, invented a machine similar to Felt's (see 1886) but more robust, and this became the design that really started the mechanical office calculator industry.

1900–1939
Date
Place
Event
1906

Henry Babbage, Charles's son, with the help of the firm of R. W. Munro, completed the 'mill' from his father's Analytical Engine, to show that it would have worked. It does. The complete machine was not produced.
1906

Vacuum Tube (or Thermionic valve) invented by Lee De Forest.
1919

William Henry Eccles and F. W. Jordan published the first flip-flop circuit design.
1924

Walther Bothe built an AND logic gate - the coincidence circuit, for use in physics experiments, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1954. However, Nikola Tesla's legal priority in the discovery can be traced to several lectures, a remote controlled submarine teleautomaton built in 1899, and a registration (US#613,809), and patent titled 'System of Signaling' (US#725,605). Digital circuitries of all kinds make heavy use of this technique.
1930

Vannevar Bush built a partly electronic Difference Engine capable of solving differential equations.
1931

Kurt Gödel of Vienna University, Austria, published a paper on a universal formal language based on arithmetic operations. He used it to encode arbitrary formal statements and proofs, and showed that formal systems such as traditional mathematics are either inconsistent in a certain sense, or contain unprovable but true statements. This result is often called: the fundamental result of theoretical computer science.
1931

Welsh physicist Charles Wynn-Williams, at Cambridge, England, used thyratron tubes to construct a binary digital counter for use in connection with physics experiments.
1936

Alan Turing of Cambridge University, England, published a paper on 'computable numbers'[27] which reformulates Kurt Gödel's results (see related work by Alonzo Church). His paper addressed the famous 'Entscheidungsproblem' whose solution was sought in the paper by reasoning (as a mathematical device) about a simple and theoretical, computer known today as a Turing machine. In many ways, this device was more convenient than Gödel's arithmetics-based universal formal system.
1937

George Stibitz of the Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs), New York City, constructed a demonstration 1-bit binary adder using relays. This was one of the first binary computers, although at this stage it was only a demonstration machine; improvements continued leading to the Complex Number Calculator of January 1940.
1937

Claude E. Shannon published a paper on the implementation of symbolic logic using relays as his MIT Master's thesis.
1938

Konrad Zuse of Berlin, completed the 'Z1', the first mechanical binary programmable computer. It was based on Boolean Algebra and had most of the basic ingredients of modern machines, using the binary system and today's standard separation of storage and control. Zuse's 1936 patent application (Z23139/GMD Nr. 005/021) also suggested a 'von Neumann' architecture (re-invented about 1945) with program and data modifiable in storage. Originally the machine was called the 'V1' but retroactively renamed after the war, to avoid confusion with the V1 buzz-bomb. It worked with floating point numbers (7-bit exponent, 16-bit mantissa, and sign bit). The memory used sliding metal parts to store 16 such numbers, and worked well; but the arithmetic unit was less successful, occasionally suffering from certain mechanical engineering problems. The program was read from holes punched in discarded 35 mm movie film. Data values could have been entered from a numeric keyboard, and outputs were displayed on electric lamps. The machine was not a general purpose computer (ie, Turing complete) because it lacked loop capabilities.
1939

William Hewlett and David Packard establish the Hewlett-Packard Company in Packard's garage in Palo Alto, California with an initial investment of $538; this was considered to be the symbolic founding of Silicon Valley. HP would grow to become the largest technology company in the world today.
1939 Nov

John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry of Iowa State College (now the Iowa State University), Ames, Iowa, completed a prototype 16-bit adder. This was the first machine to calculate using vacuum tubes.
1939

Konrad Zuse completed the 'Z2' (originally 'V2'), which combined the Z1's existing mechanical memory unit with a new arithmetic unit using relay logic. Like the Z1, the Z2 lacked loop capabilities. The project was interrupted for a year when Zuse was drafted, but continued after he was released.
1939

Helmut Schreyer completed a prototype 10-bit adder using vacuum tubes, and a prototype memory using neon lamps.
[edit] 1940–1949
Date
Place
Event
1940 Jan

At Bell Labs, Samuel Williams and George Stibitz complete a calculator which can operate on complex numbers, and give it the imaginative name of the 'Complex Number Calculator'; it is later known as the 'Model I Relay Calculator'. It uses telephone switching parts for logic: 450 relays and 10 crossbar switches. Numbers are represented in 'plus 3 BCD'; that is, for each decimal digit, 0 is represented by binary 0011, 1 by 0100, and so on up to 1100 for 9; this scheme requires fewer relays than straight BCD. Rather than requiring users to come to the machine to use it, the calculator is provided with three remote keyboards, at various places in the building, in the form of teletypes. Only one can be used at a time, and the output is automatically displayed on the same one. On 9 September 1940, a teletype is set up at a Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a connection to New York, and those attending the conference can use the machine remotely.
1940 Apr 1

Konrad Zuse founds the world's first computer startup company: the Zuse Apparatebau in Berlin.
1941 May 12

Now working with limited backing from the DVL (German Aeronautical Research Institute), Konrad Zuse completes the 'Z3' (originally 'V3'): the first operational programmable computer. One major improvement over Charles Babbage's non-functional device is the use of Leibniz's binary system (Babbage and others unsuccessfully tried to build decimal programmable computers). Zuse's machine also features floating point numbers with a 7-bit exponent, 14-bit mantissa (with a '1' bit automatically prefixed unless the number is 0), and a sign bit. The memory holds 64 of these words and therefore requires over 1400 relays; there are 1200 more in the arithmetic and control units. It also featured parallel adders. The program, input, and output are implemented as described above for the Z1. Although conditional jumps are not available, it was shown that Zuse's Z3 is indeed a universal computer. The machine can do 3-4 additions per second, and takes 3-5 seconds for a multiplication. Its rather modern, programmable, binary design makes it the forerunner of today's computers (several later well-known machines such as ENIAC still used the decimal system).
1942 Summer

Atanasoff and Berry complete a special-purpose calculator for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, later called the 'ABC' ('Atanasoff–Berry Computer'). This has 60 50-bit words of memory in the form of capacitors (with refresh circuits —the first regenerative memory) mounted on two revolving drums. The clock speed is 60 Hz, and an addition takes 1 second. For secondary memory it uses punch cards, moved around by the user. The holes are not actually punched in the cards, but burned. The punch card system's error rate is never reduced beyond 0.001%, and this isn't really good enough. Atanasoff will leave Iowa State after the U.S. enters the war, and this will end his work on digital computing machines.
1942

Konrad Zuse develops the S1, the world's first process computer, used by Henschel to measure the surface of wings.
1943 Apr

Max Newman, Wynn-Williams and their team at the secret Government Code and Cypher School ('Station X'), Bletchley Park, Bletchley, England, complete the 'Heath Robinson'. This is a specialized counting machine used for cipher-breaking, not a general-purpose calculator or computer but some sort of logic device, using a combination of electronics and relay logic. It reads data optically at 2000 characters per second from 2 closed loops of paper tape, each typically about 1000 characters long. It was significant since it was the fore-runner of Colossus. Newman knew Turing from Cambridge (Turing was a student of Newman's), and had been the first person to see a draft of Turing's 1936 paper.[27] Heath Robinson is the name of a British cartoonist known for drawings of comical machines, like the American Rube Goldberg. Two later machines in the series will be named after London stores with 'Robinson' in their names.
1943 Sep

Williams and Stibitz complete the 'Relay Interpolator', later called the 'Model II Relay Calculator'. This is a programmable calculator; again, the program and data are read from paper tapes. An innovative feature is that, for greater reliability, numbers are represented in a biquinary format using 7 relays for each digit, of which exactly 2 should be "on": 01 00001 for 0, 01 00010 for 1, and so on up to 10 10000 for 9. Some of the later machines in this series will use the biquinary notation for the digits of floating-point numbers.
1943 Dec

The Colossus was built, by Dr Thomas Flowers at The Post Office Research Laboratories in London, to crack the German Lorenz (SZ42) cipher. It contained 2400 vacuum tubes for logic and applied a programmable logical function to a stream of input characters, read from punched tape at a rate of 5000 characters a second. Colossus was used at Bletchley Park during World War II —as a successor to the unreliable Heath Robinson machines. Although 10 were eventually built, most were destroyed immediately after they had finished their work to maintain the secrecy of the work.
1944 Aug 7

The IBM ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) is turned over to Harvard University, which calls it the Harvard Mark I It was designed by Howard Aiken and his team, financed and built by IBM —it became the second program controlled machine (after Konrad Zuse's). The whole machine was 51 feet (16 m) long, weighed 5 (short) tons (4.5 tonnes), and incorporated 750,000 parts. It used 3304 electromechanical relays as on-off switches, had 72 accumulators (each with its own arithmetic unit), as well as a mechanical register with a capacity of 23 digits plus sign. The arithmetic was fixed-point and decimal, with a control panel setting determining the number of decimal places. Input-output facilities include card readers, a card punch, paper tape readers, and typewriters. There were 60 sets of rotary switches, each of which could be used as a constant register —sort of mechanical read-only memory. The program was read from one paper tape; data could be read from the other tapes, or the card readers, or from the constant registers. Conditional jumps were not available. However, in later years, the machine was modified to support multiple paper tape readers for the program, with the transfer from one to another being conditional, rather like a conditional subroutine call. Another addition allowed the provision of plug-board wired subroutines callable from the tape. Used to create ballistics tables for the US Navy.
1945

Konrad Zuse develops Plankalkül, the first higher-level programming language.
1945

Vannevar Bush develops the theory of the memex, a hypertext device linked to a library of books and films.
1945

John von Neumann drafts a report analyzing the previously built EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). His comments, entitled 'First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC', are the first detailed description of the design of a stored-program computer, giving rise to the term von Neumann architecture. It directly or indirectly influenced nearly all subsequent projects, especially EDSAC. The design team included John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
1946 Feb 14

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) : One of the first totally electronic, valve driven, digital, program-controlled computers was unveiled although it was shut down on 9 November 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. Development had started in 1943 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, USA, by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. It weighed 30 tonnes and contained 18,000 electronic valves, consuming around 160 kW of electrical power. It could do 50,000 basic calculations a second. It was used for calculating ballistic trajectories and testing theories behind the hydrogen bomb.
1946 Feb 19

ACE (Automatic Computing Engine): Alan Turing presented a detailed paper to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Executive Committee, giving the first reasonably complete design of a stored-program computer. However, because of the strict and long-lasting secrecy around his wartime work at Bletchley Park, he was prohibited (having signed the Official Secrets Act) from explaining that he knew that his ideas could be implemented in an electronic device.
1947 Dec 16

Invention of the Transistor at Bell Laboratories, USA, by William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.
1947

Howard Aiken completes the Harvard Mark II (see Harvard Mark I).
1947

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), was founded as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. It remains to this day with a membership currently around 78,000. Its headquarters are in New York City.
1948 Jan 27

IBM finishes the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator). It is the first computer to modify a stored program. "About 1300 vacuum tubes were used to construct the arithmetic unit and eight very high-speed registers, while 23000 relays were used in the control structure and 150 registers of slower memory."
1948 Jul 21

SSEM, Small-Scale Experimental Machine or 'Baby' was built at the University of Manchester, It ran its first program on this date. It was the first computer to store both its programs and data in RAM, as modern computers do. By 1949 the 'Baby' had grown, and acquired a magnetic drum for more permanent storage, and it became the Manchester Mark 1.
1948

IBM introduces the '604', the first machine to feature Field Replaceable Units (FRUs), which cuts downtime as entire pluggable units can simply be replaced instead of troubleshot.
1948
The first Curta handheld mechanical calculator is sold. The Curta computed with 11 digits of decimal precision on input operands up to 8 decimal digits. The Curta was about the size of a handheld pepper grinder.
1949 Mar

John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly construct the BINAC for Northrop.
1949 May 6

This is considered the birthday of modern computing. Maurice Wilkes and a team at Cambridge University executed the first stored program on the EDSAC computer, which used paper tape input-output. Based on ideas from John von Neumann about stored program computers, the EDSAC was the first complete, fully functional von Neumann architecture computer.
1949 Oct

The Manchester Mark 1 final specification is completed; this machine notably being the first computer to use the equivalent of base/index registers, a feature not entering common computer architecture until the second generation around 1955.
1949

CSIR Mk I (later known as CSIRAC), Australia's first computer, ran its first test program. It was a vacuum tube based electronic general purpose computer. Its main memory stored data as a series of acoustic pulses in 5 ft (1.5 m) long tubes filled with mercury.

Part b
The three were the development of the punch card tabulator, the first calculator made by Blaise Pascal, and then the difference engine made by Charles Babbage.

The von Neumann architecture is a design model for a stored-program digital computer that uses a processing unit and a single separate storage structure to hold both instructions and data. It is named after the mathematician and early computer scientist John von Neumann. Such computers implement a universal Turing machine and have a sequential architecture.
A stored-program digital computer is one that keeps its programmed instructions, as well as its data, in read-write, random-access memory (RAM). Stored-program computers were an advancement over the program-controlled computers of the 1940s, such as the Colossus and the ENIAC, which were programmed by setting switches and inserting patch leads to route data and to control signals between various functional units. In the vast majority of modern computers, the same memory is used for both data and program instructions.
The terms "von Neumann architecture" and "stored-program computer" are generally used interchangeably, and that usage is followed in this article. In contrast, the Harvard architecture stores a program in a modifiable form, but without using the same physical storage or format for general data.
Contents[hide]
1 Description
2 Development of the stored-program concept
3 Von Neumann bottleneck
4 Early von Neumann-architecture computers
5 Early stored-program computers
6 See also
7 References
7.1 Inline
7.2 General
8 External links
//
[edit] Description
The earliest computing machines had fixed programs. Some very simple computers still use this design, either for simplicity or training purposes. For example, a desk calculator (in principle) is a fixed program computer. It can do basic mathematics, but it cannot be used as a word processor or a gaming console. Changing the program of a fixed-program machine requires re-wiring, re-structuring, or re-designing the machine. The earliest computers were not so much "programmed" as they were "designed". "Reprogramming", when it was possible at all, was a laborious process, starting with flowcharts and paper notes, followed by detailed engineering designs, and then the often-arduous process of physically re-wiring and re-building the machine. It could take three weeks to set up a program on ENIAC and get it working.[1]
The idea of the stored-program computer changed all that: a computer that by design includes an instruction set and can store in memory a set of instructions (a program) that details the computation.
A stored-program design also lets programs modify themselves while running. One early motivation for such a facility was the need for a program to increment or otherwise modify the address portion of instructions, which had to be done manually in early designs. This became less important when index registers and indirect addressing became usual features of machine architecture. Self-modifying code has largely fallen out of favor, since it is usually hard to understand and debug, as well as being inefficient under modern processor pipelining and caching schemes.
On a large scale, the ability to treat instructions as data is what makes assemblers, compilers and other automated programming tools possible. One can "write programs which write programs".[2] On a smaller scale, I/O-intensive machine instructions such as the BITBLT primitive used to modify images on a bitmap display, were once thought to be impossible to implement without custom hardware. It was shown later that these instructions could be implemented efficiently by "on the fly compilation" ("just-in-time compilation") technology, e.g. code-generating programs—one form of self-modifying code that has remained popular.
There are drawbacks to the von Neumann design. Aside from the von Neumann bottleneck described below, program modifications can be quite harmful, either by accident or design. In some simple stored-program computer designs, a malfunctioning program can damage itself, other programs, or the operating system, possibly leading to a computer crash. Memory protection and other forms of access control can help protect against both accidental and malicious program modification.
[edit] Development of the stored-program concept
The mathematician Alan Turing, who had been alerted to a problem of mathematical logic by the lectures of Max Newman at the University of Cambridge, wrote a paper in 1936 entitled On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, which was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.[3] In it he described a hypothetical machine which he called a "universal computing machine", and which is now known as the "universal Turing machine". The hypothetical machine had an infinite store (memory in today's terminology) that contained both instructions and data. The German engineer Konrad Zuse independently wrote about this concept in 1936.[4] Von Neumann became acquainted with Turing when he was a visiting professor at Cambridge in 1935 and also during the year that Turing spent at Princeton University in 1936-37. Whether he knew of Turing's 1936 paper at that time is not clear.
Independently, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who were developing the ENIAC at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote about the stored-program concept in December 1943.[5][6] In planning a new machine, EDVAC, Eckert wrote in January 1944 that they would store data and programs in a new addressable memory device, a mercury metal delay line. This was the first time the construction of a practical stored-program was proposed. At that time, they were not aware of Turing's work.
Von Neumann was involved in the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which required huge amounts of calculation. This drew him to the ENIAC project, in the summer of 1944. There he joined into the ongoing discussions on the design of this stored-program computer, the EDVAC. As part of that group, he volunteered to write up a description of it. The term "von Neumann architecture" arose from von Neumann's paper First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC dated 30 June 1945, which included ideas from Eckert and Mauchly. It was unfinished when his colleague Herman Goldstine circulated it with only von Neumann's name on it, to the consternation of Eckert and Mauchly.[7] The paper was read by dozens of von Neumann's colleagues in America and Europe, and influenced the next round of computer designs.
Later, Turing produced a detailed technical report Proposed Electronic Calculator describing the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE).[8] He presented this to the Executive Committee of the British National Physical Laboratory on 19 February 1946. Although Turing knew from his wartime experience at Bletchley Park that what he proposed was feasible, the secrecy that was maintained about Colossus for several decades prevented him from saying so. Various successful implementations of the ACE design were produced.
Both von Neumann's and Turing's papers described stored program-computers, but von Neumann's earlier paper achieved greater circulation and the computer architecture it outlined became known as the "von Neumann architecture". In the 1953 book Faster than Thought edited by B V Bowden a section in the chapter on Computers in America read as follows.[9]
THE MACHINE OF THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES, PRINCETON
In 1945, Professor J. von Neumann, who was then working at the Moore School of Engineering in Philadelphia, where the E.N.I.A.C. had been built, issued on behalf of a group of his co-workers a report on the logical design of digital computers. The report contained a fairly detailed proposal for the design of the machine which has since become known as the E.D.V.A.C. (electronic discrete variable automatic computer). This machine has only recently been completed in America, but the von Neumann report inspired the construction of the E.D.S.A.C. (electronic delay-storage automatic calculator) in Cambridge (see page 130).
In 1947, Burks, Goldstine and von Neumann published another report which outlined the design of another type of machine (a parallel machine this time) which should be exceedingly fast, capable perhaps of 20,000 operations per second. They pointed out that the outstanding problem in constructing such a machine was in the development of a suitable memory, all the contents of which were instantaneously accessible, and at first they suggested the use of a special tube—called the Selectron, which had been invented by the Princeton Laboratories of the R.C.A. These tubes were expensive and difficult to make, so von Neumann subsequently decided to build a machine based on the Williams memory. This machine, which was completed in June, 1952 in Princeton has become popularly known as the Maniac. The design of this machine has inspired that of half a dozen or more machines which are now being built in America, all of which are known affectionately as "Johniacs."
In the same book, in a chapter on ACE, the first two paragraphs read as follows.[10]
AUTOMATIC COMPUTATION AT THE NATIONAL PHYSICAL LABORATORY
One of the most modern digital computers which embodies developments and improvements in the technique of automatic electronic computing was recently demonstrated at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, where it has been designed and built by a small team of mathematicians and electronics research engineers on the staff of the Laboratory, assisted by a number of production engineers from the English Electric Company, Limited. The equipment so far erected at the Laboratory is only the pilot model of a much larger installation which will be known as the Automatic Computing Engine, but although comparatively small in bulk and containing only about 800 thermionic valves, as can be judged from Plates XII, XIII and XIV, it is an extremely rapid and versatile calculating machine.
The basic concepts and abstract principles of computation by a machine were formulated by Dr. A. M. Turing, F.R.S., in a paper1. read before the London Mathematical Society in 1936, but work on such machines in Britain was delayed by the war. In 1945, however, an examination of the problems was made at the National Physical Laboratory by Mr. J. R. Womersley, then superintendent of the Mathematics Division of the Laboratory. He was joined by Dr. Turing and a small staff of specialists, and, by 1947, the preliminary planning was sufficiently advanced to warrant the establishment of the special group already mentioned. In April, 1948, the latter became the Electronics Section of the Laboratory, under the charge of Mr. F. M. Colebrook.
[edit] Von Neumann bottleneck
The separation between the CPU and memory leads to the Von Neumann bottleneck, the limited throughput (data transfer rate) between the CPU and memory compared to the amount of memory. In most modern computers, throughput is much smaller than the rate at which the CPU can work. This seriously limits the effective processing speed when the CPU is required to perform minimal processing on large amounts of data. The CPU is continuously forced to wait for needed data to be transferred to or from memory. Since CPU speed and memory size have increased much faster than the throughput between them, the bottleneck has become more of a problem.
The term "Von Neumann bottleneck" was coined by John Backus in his 1977 ACM Turing Award lecture. According to Backus:
Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through the Von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand. Thus programming is basically planning and detailing the enormous traffic of words through the Von Neumann bottleneck, and much of that traffic concerns not significant data itself, but where to find it.[11]
The performance problem is reduced by a cache between the CPU and the main memory, and by the development of branch predictor algorithms. It is less clear whether the intellectual bottleneck that Backus criticized has changed much since 1977. Backus's proposed solution has not had a major influence. Modern functional programming and object-oriented programming are much less geared towards "pushing vast numbers of words back and forth" than earlier languages like Fortran were, but internally, that is still what computers spend much of their time doing.
[edit] Early von Neumann-architecture computers
The First Draft described a design that was used by many universities and corporations to construct their computers.[12] Among these various computers, only ILLIAC and ORDVAC had compatible instruction sets.
ORDVAC (U-Illinois) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland (completed Nov 1951[13])
IAS machine at Princeton University (Jan 1952)
MANIAC I at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (Mar 1952)
ILLIAC at the University of Illinois, (Sept 1952)
AVIDAC at Argonne National Laboratory (1953)
ORACLE at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Jun 1953)
JOHNNIAC at RAND Corporation (Jan 1954)
BESK in Stockholm (1953)
BESM-1 in Moscow (1952)
DASK in Denmark (1955)
PERM in Munich (1956?)
SILLIAC in Sydney (1956)
WEIZAC in Rehovoth (1955)
[edit] Early stored-program computers
The date information in the following chronology is difficult to put into proper order. Some dates are for first running a test program, some dates are the first time the computer was demonstrated or completed, and some dates are for the first delivery or installation.
The IBM SSEC was a stored-program electromechanical computer and was publicly demonstrated on January 27, 1948. However it was partially electromechanical, thus not fully electronic.
The Manchester SSEM (the Baby) was the first fully electronic computer to run a stored program. It ran a factoring program for 52 minutes on June 21, 1948, after running a simple division program and a program to show that two numbers were relatively prime.
The ENIAC was modified to run as a primitive read-only stored-program computer (using the Function Tables for program ROM) and was demonstrated as such on September 16, 1948, running a program by Adele Goldstine for von Neumann.
The BINAC ran some test programs in February, March, and April 1949, although it wasn't completed until September 1949.
The Manchester Mark 1 developed from the SSEM project. An intermediate version of the Mark 1 was available to run programs in April 1949, but it wasn't completed until October 1949.
The EDSAC ran its first program on May 6, 1949.
The EDVAC was delivered in August 1949, but it had problems that kept it from being put into regular operation until 1951.
The CSIR Mk I ran its first program in November 1949.
The SEAC was demonstrated in April 1950.
The Pilot ACE ran its first program on May 10, 1950 and was demonstrated in December 1950.
The SWAC was completed in July 1950.
The Whirlwind was completed in December 1950 and was in actual use in April 1951.
The first ERA Atlas (later the commercial ERA 1101/UNIVAC 1101) was installed in December 1950.
[edit] See also
Computer science portal
Harvard architecture
Modified Harvard architecture
Turing machine
Random access machine
Little man computer
CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation
Von Neumann syndrome
Interconnect bottleneck
[edit] References
[edit] Inline
^ Copeland (2006) p. 104.
^ "MFTL (My Favorite Toy Language) entry Jargon File 4.4.7". http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/MFTL.html. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
^ Turing, A.M. (1936), "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2 42: 230–65, 1937, doi:10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230 (and Turing, A.M. (1938), "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem: A correction", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2 43: 544–6, 1937, doi:10.1112/plms/s2-43.6.544 )
^ "The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse Part 10: Konrad Zuse and the Stored Program Computer". http://www.epemag.com/zuse/part10.htm. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
^ Lukoff, Herman (1979). From Dits to Bits...: A Personal History of the Electronic Computer. Robotics Press. ISBN 978-0-89661-002-6.
^ ENIAC project administrator Grist Brainerd's December 1943 progress report for the first period of the ENIAC's development implicitly proposed the stored program concept (while simultaneously rejecting its implementation in the ENIAC) by stating that "in order to have the simplest project and not to complicate matters" the ENIAC would be constructed without any "automatic regulation".
^ Copeland (2006) p. 113
^ Copeland (2006) pp. 108-111
^ Bowden (1953) pp. 176,177
^ Bowden (1953) p. 135
^ "E. W. Dijkstra Archive: A review of the 1977 Turing Award Lecture". http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD692.html. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
^ "Electronic Computer Project". http://www.ias.edu/spfeatures/john_von_neumann/electronic-computer-project/.
^ Illiac Design Techniques, report number UIUCDCS-R-1955-146, Digital Computer Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1955
[edit] General
Bowden, B.V., ed. (1953), "Computers in America", Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines, London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd.
Rojas, Raúl; Hashagen, Ulf, eds. (2000), The First Computers: History and Architectures, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-18197-5
Davis, Martin (2000), The universal computer: the road from Leibniz to Turing, New York: W W Norton & Company Inc., ISBN 0-393-04785-7
Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?, John Backus, 1977 ACM Turing Award Lecture. Communications of the ACM, August 1978, Volume 21, Number 8. Online PDF
C. Gordon Bell and Allen Newell (1971), Computer Structures: Readings and Examples, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. Massive (668 pages).
Copeland, Jack (2006), "Colossus and the Rise of the Modern Computer", in Copeland, B. Jack, Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-284055-4 .
[edit] External links
Harvard vs Von Neumann
A tool that emulates the behavior of a von Neumann machine
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Instruction pipelining · In-order & out-of-order execution · Register renaming · Speculative execution
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APM · ACPI (states) · Dynamic frequency scaling · Dynamic voltage scaling · Clock gating

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