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WEEK 5.
TOPIC: COMPUTING DEVICE II (20TH CENTURY TO DATE)
CONTENT:
- Features, components and uses of ENIAC
- Features, components and uses of EDVAC
- Features, components and uses of UNIVAC 1
- Features, components and uses of Desktop Personal Computer.
- Features, components and uses of Laptop and Notebook Computers.
- Features, components and uses of Palm top Computers.
Sub-Topic 1: FEATURES, COMPONENTS AND USES OF ENIAC
INTRODUCTION:
The twentieth century computers are mechanical and electro-mechanical devices that possesses input unit, memory unit, processing etc. and can as well perform automatic operations. Among the early computing device, the twentieth century are Mark1, ENIAC, EDVAC, UNIVAC and Von Newman machine etc.
FEATURES, COMPONENTS AND USES OF ENIAC:
ENIAC, in full Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, built during World War II by the United States. In the United States, government funding during the war went to a project led by John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and their colleagues at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania; their objective was an all-electronic computer.
ENIAC was something less than the dream of a universal computer. Designed for the specific purpose of computing values for artillery range tables, it lacked some features that would have made it a more generally useful machine. It used plugboards for communicating instructions to the machine; this had the advantage that, once the instructions were thus “programmed,” the machine ran at electronic speed. Instructions read from a card reader or other slow mechanical device would not have been able to keep up with the all-electronic ENIAC. The disadvantage was that it took days to rewire the machine for each new problem. This was such a liability that only with some generosity could it be called programmable.
Nevertheless, ENIAC was the most powerful calculating device built to date. It was the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer. This gave ENIAC a lot of flexibility and meant that, while it was built for a specific purpose, it could be used for a wider range of problems.
ENIAC ran continuously (in part to extend tube life), generating 150 kilowatts of heat, and could execute up to 5,000 additions per second, several orders of magnitude faster than its electromechanical predecessors. It and subsequent computers employing vacuum tubes are known as first-generation computers. (With 1,500 mechanical relays, ENIAC was still transitional to later, fully electronic computers.)
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