John von Neumann

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John von Neumann

• First draft of a Report on the EDVAC
• 30 June, 1945
• Founding document of modern computing

von Neumann architecture used in most
non-parallel processing computers
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János von Neumann
1903-1957

• Non-practicing Jewish family
• Mathematical prodigy and party animal
• Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of
  Budapest at the age of 23

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John von Neumann

• Princeton University 1930
• the father of game theory
• during World War II part of the Manhattan Project
  to develop the first atomic weapons
• mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics
  heavily based on statistical concepts

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John von Neumann

• Designed first examples of self-replicating
  automata with pencil and graph paper

• Explored problems of numerical hydrodynamics
• Died of cancer in Washington D.C

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Human Calculating Machine
North American Aviation, early 1950s
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Ten Years Later
Same company with two IBM 7090 computers for
designing and testing rocket engines
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Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation
1948
Computing after 1945 is the story of people, who
at critical moments, redefined the nature of the
technology itself
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Univac I

• used 5,200 vacuum tubes
• weighed 13 metric tons
• consumed 125 kW/h
• 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25
  MHz clock
• mercury delay line memory unit 4.3 m 2.4 m
  2.6 m

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Univac I

• complete system occupied more than 35.5 m²
• main memory 1000 words of 11 decimal digits plus
  sign (72 bit words)
• The input and output memory 120 words, consisting
  of 12 channels of 10 word mercury registers

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Univac I

• Between 1,250,000 and 1,500,000
• 46 systems built and delivered

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Univac I
mercury delay line memory

• 7 large mercury tanks
• eighteen 10-word channels
• horizontal columns of mercury with sending and
  receiving piezoelectric quartz crystals at each
  end
• channels separated by metal tube waveguides as
  the data bits moved through the mercury

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Univac I

• Each 10-word channel held 910 bits
• 910-bits re-circulated every 404 µ-seconds
• Frequency of the carrier wave for the 910 bits as
  they moved through the mercury column was 11.25
  Mhz
• Main clock in sync with 910 bits of a 10 word
  channel and provided timing for all operations

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Admiral Grace Hopper

• I am pleased that history recognizes the first
  to invent something, but I am more concerned with
  the first person to make it work. Grace Hopper

1906 - 1992
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Grace Hopper

• Wrote the first manual of operations
• Invented the compiler
• First debugger
• "progenitor" of COBOL

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An Wang 1920 - 1990

• 1948 -PhD in applied physics Harvard University
• 1951-Founded Wang Labs
• 1955-Awarded patent for a pulse transfer
  controlling device that made the magnetic core
  possible, which he also invented
• 1965 -Introduced LOCI the first calculator that
  produces a logarithm in one single keystroke

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Magnetic core memory
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Magnetic core memory
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Magnetic core memory
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Magnetic core memory
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Magnetic core memory
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Transistors

• Invented in Bell Laboratories
• Working as memory in the lab in the early 1950s

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The Third Generation
The microscopic integrated circuit combined many
hundreds of transistors into one unit for
fabrication.