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发信人: JJason (C++ Primer), 信区: ITnews
标  题: 计算机历史的幽灵，新机器的灵魂
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (2002年11月28日15:01:23 星期四), 站内信件

计算机历史的幽灵，新机器的灵魂
(2002.11.27)   来自：博客中国


作者：博客中国



    位于硅谷的“计算机历史博物馆”（Computer History Museum），想把半个世纪的计
算机创新历史重新展现在人们面前。诸多计算机历史上独一无二的原始机器和模型汇聚于
此，构建出一个独特的世界。该博物馆成立于1996年，是一个非赢利机构，得到了诸多巨
头、先锋们的支持。目前已经收藏3,500件“史前古玩物”（当然是对计算机历史而言），
3,000卷胶卷和录像带，5,000幅照片和3,500本归类目录。如同硅谷在全球IT业的地位一般
，博物馆的目标也是成为世界IT的“圣地”。当然，要达到这个目的，互联网是最好的工
具。下面，请大家简单浏览一下该博物馆的计算机作为机器的演变历史。我们会惊讶，历
史在互联网上也能够那么壮观、美丽。

    说明：转载内容仅仅是一个简单导航，文中有诸多链接摁钮，感兴趣的内容大家可以
直接点入，进入原来的网站，浏览丰富的内容。

John von Neumann  1945 John von Neumann wrote "First Draft of a Report on the
EDVAC" in which he outlined the architecture of a stored-program computer.
Electronic storage of programming information and data eliminated the need
for the more clumsy methods of programming, such as punched paper tape -- a
concept that has characterized mainstream computer development since 1945.
Hungarian-born von Neumann demonstrated prodigious expertise in
hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the use
of mechanical devices for computation. After the war, he concentrated on the
development of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies computer and its
copies around the world.


ENIAC  1946 In February, the public got its first glimpse of the ENIAC, a
machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000
times on the speed of its contemporaries.
Start of project: 1943
Completed: 1946
Programmed: plug board and switches
Speed: 5,000 operations per second
Input/output: cards, lights, switches, plugs
Floor space: 1,000 square feet
Project leaders: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.



AVIDAC  1946 An inspiring summer school on computing at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering stimulated
construction of stored-program computers at universities and research
institutions. This free, public set of lectures inspired the EDSAC, BINAC,
and, later, IAS machine clones like the AVIDAC. Here, Warren Kelleher
completes the wiring of the arithmetic unit components of the AVIDAC at
Argonne National Laboratory. Robert Dennis installs the inter-unit wiring as
James Woody Jr. adjusts the deflection control circuits of the memory unit.


IBM’s SSEC  1948 IBM’s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed
scientific data in public display near the company’s Manhattan headquarters.
Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position
tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.
Speed: 50 multiplications per second
Input/output: cards, punched tape
Memory type: punched tape, vacuum tubes, relays
Technology: 20,000 relays, 12,500 vacuum tubes
Floor space: 25 feet by 40 feet
Project leader: Wallace Eckert



Wilkes with the EDSAC  1949 Maurice Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first
practical stored-program computer, at Cambridge University. His ideas grew
out of the Moore School lectures he had attended three years earlier.

For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short programs
called subroutines stored on punched paper tapes.
Technology: vacuum tubes
Memory: 1K words, 17 bits, mercury delay line
Speed: 714 operations per second



Manchester Mark I  1949 The Manchester Mark I computer functioned as a
complete system using the Williams tube for memory. This University machine
became the prototype for Ferranti Corp.’s first computer.
Start of project: 1947
Completed: 1949
Add time: 1.8 milliseconds
Input/output: paper tape, teleprinter, switches
Memory size: 128 + 1024 40-digit words
Memory type: cathode ray tube, magnetic drum
Technology: 1,300 vacuum tubes
Floor space: medium room
Project leaders: Frederick Williams and Tom Kilburn



ERA 1101 drum memory  1950 Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis
built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer; the company’s
first customer was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic
drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Drums registered information as
magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder. Read/write heads both
recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000
words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a
second.


SEAC  1950 The National Bureau of Standards constructed the SEAC (Standards
Eastern Automatic Computer) in Washington as a laboratory for testing
components and systems for setting computer standards. The SEAC was the first
computer to use all-diode logic, a technology more reliable than vacuum
tubes, and the first stored-program computer completed in the United States.
Magnetic tape in the external storage units (shown on the right of this
photo) stored programming information, coded subroutines, numerical data, and
output.


SWAC  1950 The National Bureau of Standards completed its SWAC (Standards
Western Automatic Computer) at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los
Angeles. Rather than testing components like its companion, the SEAC, the
SWAC had an objective of computing using already-developed technology.


Pilot ACE  1950 Alan Turing’s philosophy directed design of Britain’s
Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory. "We are trying to build a
machine to do all kinds of different things simply by programming rather than
by the addition of extra apparatus," Turing said at a symposium on
large-scale digital calculating machinery in 1947 in Cambridge, Mass.
Start of project: 1948
Completed: 1950
Add time: 540 microseconds
Input/output: cards
Memory size: 352 32-digit words
Memory type: delay lines
Technology: 800 vacuum tubes
Floor space: 12 square feet
Project leader: J. H. Wilkinson



MIT Whirlwind  1951 MIT’s Whirlwind debuted on Edward R. Murrow’s "See It
Now" television series. Project director Jay Forrester described the computer
as a "reliable operating system," running 35 hours a week at 90-percent
utility using an electrostatic tube memory.
Start of project: 1945
Completed: 1951
Add time: 50 microseconds
Input/output: cathode ray tube, paper tape, magnetic tape
Memory size: 2048 16-digit words
Memory type: cathode ray tube, magnetic drum, tape (1953 - core memory)
Technology: 4,500 vacuum tubes, 14,800 diodes
Floor space: 3,100 square feet
Project leaders: Jay Forrester and Robert Everett



LEO  1951 England’s first commercial computer, the Lyons Electronic Office,
solved clerical problems. The president of Lyons Tea Co. had the computer,
modeled after the EDSAC, built to solve the problem of daily scheduling
production and delivery of cakes to the Lyons tea shops. After the success of
the first LEO, Lyons went into business manufacturing computers to meet the
growing need for data processing systems.


UNIVAC I  1951 The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the
first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although
manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to
as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than
$1 million each.
Speed: 1,905 operations per second
Input/output: magnetic tape, unityper, printer
Memory size: 1,000 12-digit words in delay lines
Memory type: delay lines, magnetic tape
Technology: serial vacuum tubes, delay lines, magnetic tape
Floor space: 943 cubic feet
Cost: F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer
Project leaders: J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly



von Neumann’s IAS  1952 John von Neumann’s IAS computer became operational
at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. Contract obliged the
builders to share their designs with other research institutes. This resulted
in a number of clones: the MANIAC at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the
ILLIAC at the University of Illinois, the Johnniac at Rand Corp., the SILLIAC
in Australia, and others.


IBM 701  1953 IBM shipped its first electronic computer, the 701. During
three years of production, IBM sold 19 machines to research laboratories,
aircraft companies, and the federal government.


IBM 650  1954 The IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator established itself as the
first mass-produced computer, with the company selling 450 in one year.
Spinning at 12,500 rpm, the 650’s magnetic data-storage drum allowed much
faster access to stored material than drum memory machines.


MIT TX0  1956 MIT researchers built the TX-0, the first general-purpose,
programmable computer built with transistors. For easy replacement, designers
placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube.
Constructed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, the TX-0 moved to the MIT Research
Laboratory of Electronics, where it hosted some early imaginative tests of
programming, including a Western movie shown on TV, 3-D tic-tac-toe, and a
maze in which mouse found martinis and became increasingly inebriated.


SAGE operator station  1958 SAGE -- Semi-Automatic Ground Environment --
linked hundreds of radar stations in the United States and Canada in the
first large-scale computer communications network. An operator directed
actions by touching a light gun to the screen.

The air defense system operated on the AN/FSQ-7 computer (known as Whirlwind
II during its development at MIT) as its central computer. Each computer used
a full megawatt of power to drive its 55,000 vacuum tubes, 175,000 diodes and
13,000 transistors.



  1958 Japan’s NEC built the country’s first electronic computer, the NEAC
1101.


IBM STRETCH (in background)  1959 IBM’s 7000 series mainframes were the
company’s first transistorized computers. At the top of the line of
computers -- all of which emerged significantly faster and more dependable
than vacuum tube machines -- sat the 7030, also known as the "Stretch." Seven
of the computers, which featured a 64-bit word and other innovations, were
sold to national laboratories and other scientific users. L. R. Johnson first
used the term "architecture" in describing the Stretch.


DEC PDP-1  1960 The precursor to the minicomputer, DEC’s PDP-1 sold for
$120,000. One of 50 built, the average PDP-1 included with a cathode ray tube
graphic display, needed no air conditioning and required only one operator. It
’s large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first
computerized video game, SpaceWar!, for it. The SpaceWar! creators then used
the game as a standard demonstration on all 50 computers.


IBM 1401  1961 According to Datamation magazine, IBM had an 81.2-percent
share of the computer market in 1961, the year in which it introduced the
1400 Series. The 1401 mainframe, the first in the series, replaced the vacuum
tube with smaller, more reliable transistors and used a magnetic core memory.

Demand called for more than 12,000 of the 1401 computers, and the machine’s
success made a strong case for using general-purpose computers rather than
specialized systems.



Clark with LINC-8  1962 The LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation Computer)
offered the first real time laboratory data processing. Designed by Wesley
Clark at Lincoln Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp. later commercialized
it as the LINC-8.

Research faculty came to a workshop at MIT to build their own machines, most
of which they used in biomedical studies. DEC supplied components.



IBM System/360  1964 IBM announced the System/360, a family of six mutually
compatible computers and 40 peripherals that could work together. The initial
investment of $5 billion was quickly returned as orders for the system
climbed to 1,000 per month within two years. At the time IBM released the
System/360, the company was making a transition from discrete transistors to
integrated circuits, and its major source of revenue moved from punched-card
equipment to electronic computer systems.


CDC 6600  1964 CDC’s 6600 supercomputer, designed by Seymour Cray,
performed up to 3 million instructions per second -- a processing speed three
times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM Stretch. The 6600
retained the distinction of being the fastest computer in the world until
surpassed by its successor, the CDC 7600, in 1968. Part of the speed came
from the computer’s design, which had 10 small computers, known as
peripheral processors, funneling data to a large central processing unit.


DEC PDP-8  1965 Digital Equipment Corp. introduced the PDP-8, the first
commercially successful minicomputer. The PDP-8 sold for $18,000, one-fifth
the price of a small IBM 360 mainframe. The speed, small size, and reasonable
cost enabled the PDP-8 to go into thousands of manufacturing plants, small
businesses, and scientific laboratories.


ILLIAC IV  1966 The Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
contracted with the University of Illinois to build a large parallel
processing computer, the ILLIAC IV, which did not operate until 1972 at NASA’s
Ames Research Center. The first large-scale array computer, the ILLIAC IV
achieved a computation speed of 200 million instructions per second, about
300 million operations per second, and 1 billion bits per second of I/O
transfer via a unique combination of parallel architecture and the
overlapping or "pipe-lining" structure of its 64 processing elements.

This photograph shows one of the ILLIAC’s 13 Burroughs disks, the debugging
computer, the central unit, and the processing unit cabinet with a processing
element.



HP-2115  1966 Hewlett-Packard entered the general purpose computer business
with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power formerly
found only in much larger computers. It supported a wide variety of
languages, among them BASIC, ALGOL, and FORTRAN.


Ed deCastro and Nova  1968 Data General Corp., started by a group of
engineers that had left Digital Equipment Corp., introduced the Nova, with 32
kilobytes of memory, for $8,000.

In the photograph, Ed deCastro, president and founder of Data General, sits
with a Nova minicomputer. The simple architecture of the Nova instruction set
inspired Steve Wozniak’s Apple I board eight years later.



Apollo Guidance Computer  1968 The Apollo Guidance Computer made its debut
orbiting the Earth on Apollo 7. A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the
lunar surface. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching
two-digit codes and the appropriate syntactic category into the display and
keyboard unit.


Kenbak-1  1971 The Kenbak-1, the first personal computer, advertised for
$750 in Scientific American. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard
medium-scale and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on
switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973,
after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corp. closed its doors.


HP-35  1972 Hewlett-Packard announced the HP-35 as "a fast, extremely
accurate electronic slide rule" with a solid-state memory similar to that of
a computer. The HP-35 distinguished itself from its competitors by its
ability to perform a broad variety of logarithmic and trigonometric
functions, to store more intermediate solutions for later use, and to accept
and display entries in a form similar to standard scientific notation.


TV Typewriter  1973 The TV Typewriter, designed by Don Lancaster, provided
the first display of alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set.
It used $120 worth of electronics components, as outlined in the September
1973 issue of Radio Electronics. The original design included two memory
boards and could generate and store 512 characters as 16 lines of 32
characters. A 90-minute cassette tape provided supplementary storage for
about 100 pages of text.


Micral  1973 The Micral was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal
computer based on a micro-processor, the Intel 8008. Thi Truong developed the
computer and Philippe Kahn the software. Truong, founder and president of the
French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in
situations that didn’t require high performance. Selling for $1,750, the
Micral never penetrated the U.S. market. In 1979, Truong sold Micral to
Bull.


Xerox Alto  1974 Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center designed
the Alto -- the first work station with a built-in mouse for input. The Alto
stored several files simultaneously in windows, offered menus and icons, and
could link to a local area network. Although Xerox never sold the Alto
commercially, it gave a number of them to universities. Engineers later
incorporated its features into work stations and personal computers.


Scelbi 8H  1974 Scelbi advertised its 8H computer, the first commercially
advertised U.S. computer based on a microprocessor, Intel’s 8008. Scelbi
aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific,
electronic, and biological applications. It had 4 kilobytes of internal
memory and a cassette tape, with both teletype and oscilloscope interfaces.
In 1975, Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 kilobytes of memory for the
business market. The company sold about 200 machines, losing $500 per unit.



MITS Altair
  1975 The January edition of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800
computer kit, based on Intel’s 8080 microprocessor, on its cover. Within
weeks of the computer’s debut, customers inundated the manufacturing
company, MITS, with orders. Bill Gates and Paul Allen licensed BASIC as the
software language for the Altair. Ed Roberts invented the 8800 -- which sold
for $297, or $395 with a case -- and coined the term "personal computer." The
machine came with 256 bytes of memory (expandable to 64K) and an open
100-line bus structure that evolved into the S-100 standard. In 1977, MITS
sold out to Pertec, which continued producing Altairs through 1978.


Felsenstein’s VDM  1975 The visual display module (VDM) prototype, designed
in 1975 by Lee Felsenstein, marked the first implementation of a
memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers. Introduced
at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March 1976, the visual display
module allowed use of personal computers for interactive games.


Tandem-16  1975 Tandem Computers tailored its Tandem-16, the first
fault-tolerant computer, for online transaction processing. The banking
industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or
expansion.


Apple I  1976 Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I, a single-board computer.
With specifications in hand and an order for 100 machines at $500 each from
the Byte Shop, he and Steve Jobs got their start in business. In this
photograph of the Apple I board, the upper two rows are a video terminal and
the lower two rows are the computer. The 6502 microprocessor in the white
package sits on the lower right. About 200 of the machines sold before the
company announced the Apple II as a complete computer.


Cray I  1976 The Cray I made its name as the first commercially successful
vector processor. The fastest machine of its day, its speed came partly from
its shape, a C, which reduced the length of wires and thus the time signals
needed to travel across them. Project started: 1972
Project completed: 1976
Speed: 166 million floating-point operations per second
Size: 58 cubic feet
Weight: 5,300 lbs.
Technology: Integrated circuit
Clock rate: 83 million cycles per second
Word length: 64-bit words
Instruction set: 128 instructions



Commodore PET  1977 The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) --
the first of several personal computers released in 1977 -- came fully
assembled and was straightforward to operate, with either 4 or 8 kilobytes of
memory, two built-in cassette drives, and a membrane "chiclet" keyboard.


Apple II  1977 The Apple II became an instant success when released in 1977
with it’s printed circuit motherboard, switching power supply, keyboard,
case assembly, manual, game paddles, A/C powercord, and cassette tape with
the computer game "Breakout." When hooked up to a color television set, the
Apple II produced brilliant color graphics.


TRS-80  1977 In the first month after its release, Tandy Radio Shack’s
first desktop computer -- the TRS-80 -- sold 10,000 units, well more than the
company’s projected sales of 3,000 units for one year. Priced at $599.95,
the machine included a Z80 based microprocessor, a video display, 4 kilobytes
of memory, BASIC, cassette storage, and easy-to-understand manuals that
assumed no prior knowledge on the part of the consumer.


VAX 11/780  1978 The VAX 11/780 from Digital Equipment Corp. featured the
ability to address up to 4.3 gigabytes of virtual memory, providing hundreds
of times the capacity of most minicomputers.


  1981 IBM introduced its PC, igniting a fast growth of the personal computer
market. The first PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used
Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.


Osborne I  1981 Adam Osborne completed the first portable computer, the
Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. The price made the
machine especially attractive, as it included software worth about $1,500.
The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and
two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.

In April 1981, Byte Magazine Editor in Chief Chris Morgan mentioned the
Osborne I in an article on "Future Trends in Personal Computing." He wrote:
"I recently had an opportunity to see the Osborne I in action. I was
impressed with it’s compactness: it will fit under an airplane seat. (Adam
Osborne is currently seeking approval from the FAA to operate the unit on
board a plane.) One quibble: the screen may be too small for some people’s
taste."



Apollo DN100  1981 Apollo Computer unveiled the first work station, its
DN100, offering more power than some minicomputers at a fraction of the
price. Apollo Computer and Sun Microsystems, another early entrant in the
work station market, optimized their machines to run the computer-intensive
graphics programs common in engineering.


  1982 The Cray XMP, first produced in this year, almost doubled the
operating speed of competing machines with a parallel processing system that
ran at 420 million floating-point operations per second, or megaflops.
Arranging two Crays to work together on different parts of the same problem
achieved the faster speed. Defense and scientific research institutes also
heavily used Crays.


  1983 Apple introduced its Lisa. The first personal computer with a
graphical user interface, its development was central in the move to such
systems for personal computers. The Lisa’s sloth and high price ($10,000)
led to its ultimate failure.

The Lisa ran on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with 1
megabyte of RAM, a 12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5 1/4-inch floppy
disk drives and a 5 megabyte Profile hard drive. The Xerox Star -- which
included a system called Smalltalk that involved a mouse, windows, and pop-up
menus -- inspired the Lisa’s designers.



Compaq PC clone  1983 Compaq Computer Corp. introduced first PC clone that
used the same software as the IBM PC. With the success of the clone, Compaq
recorded first-year sales of $111 million, the most ever by an American
business in a single year.

With the introduction of its PC clone, Compaq launched a market for
IBM-compatible computers that by 1996 had achieved a 83-percent share of the
personal computer market. Designers reverse-engineered the Compaq clone,
giving it nearly 100-percent compatibility with the IBM.



Apple Macintosh  1984 Apple Computer launched the Macintosh, the first
successful mouse-driven computer with a graphic user interface, with a single
$1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl. Based on the Motorola
68000 microprocessor, the Macintosh included many of the Lisa’s features at
a much more affordable price: $2,500.

Apple’s commercial played on the theme of George Orwell’s "1984" and
featured the destruction of Big Brother with the power of personal computing
found in a Macintosh. Applications that came as part of the package included
MacPaint, which made use of the mouse, and MacWrite, which demonstrated
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processing.



IBM PC Jr.  1984 IBM released its PC Jr. and PC-AT. The PC Jr. failed, but
the PC-AT, several times faster than original PC and based on the Intel 80286
chip, claimed success with its notable increases in performance and storage
capacity, all for about $4,000. It also included more RAM and accommodated
high-density 1.2-megabyte 5 1/4-inch floppy disks.


Connection Machine  1986 Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corp. moved
artificial intelligence a step forward when he developed the controversial
concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine. The machine used
16,000 processors and could complete several billion operations per second.
Each processor had its own small memory linked with others through a flexible
network that users could alter by reprogramming rather than rewiring.

The machine’s system of connections and switches let processors broadcast
information and requests for help to other processors in a simulation of
brainlike associative recall. Using this system, the machine could work
faster than any other at the time on a problem that could be parceled out
among the many processors.



  1986 IBM and MIPS released the first RISC-based workstations, the PC/RT and
R2000-based systems. Reduced instruction set computers grew out of the
observation that the simplest 20 percent of a computer’s instruction set
does 80 percent of the work, including most base operations such as add, load
from memory, and store in memory.

The IBM PC-RT had 1 megabyte of RAM, a 1.2-megabyte floppy disk drive, and a
40-megabyte hard drive. It performed 2 million instructions per second, but
other RISC-based computers worked significantly faster.



IBM PS/2  1987 IBM introduced its PS/2 machines, which made the 3 1/2-inch
floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard for IBM computers. The
first IBMs to include Intel’s 80386 chip, the company had shipped more than
1 million units by the end of the year. IBM released a new operating system,
OS/2, at the same time, allowing the use of a mouse with IBMs for the first
time.


NeXT  1988 Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left Apple to form his own
company, unveiled the NeXT. The computer he created failed but was recognized
as an important innovation. At a base price of $6,500, the NeXT ran too
slowly to be popular.

The significance of the NeXT rested in its place as the first personal
computer to incorporate a drive for an optical storage disk, a built-in
digital signal processor that allowed voice recognition, and object-oriented
languages to simplify programming. The NeXT offered Motorola 68030
microprocessors, 8 megabytes of RAM, and a 256-megabyte read/write optical
disk storage.

来源：计算机历史博物馆，更丰富的内容请看：http://www.computerhistory.org/

--

     人生，就是一团欲望：
     欲望没有满足的时候就是痛苦，
     欲望被满足的时候就是无聊；
     人生就是在痛苦与无聊之间徘徊。

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