CSC 105 - Midterm #1

Pascal's Adder (Blaise Pascal)

1642 1st mechanized adding machine gears and wheels add and subtract, calculate taxes inaccurate

Jacquard's Loom (Joseph Marie Jacquard)

1800 weaving loom metal punch cards to position threads for the weaving process within the decade, 11,000 used in France may have been 1st case of unemployment caused by automation

Difference Engine

1822-33 Charles Babbage abandoned, wasn't precise

Analytical Engine

1830-71 Charles Babbage designed but never completed, ahead of its time mill - arithmetic computations store - store data and results operation cards - program instructions variable cards - select memory location for ops output - printer or punch cards

Herman Hollerith

1860-1929 machine that used electric charges to read into off of punch cards started his own company in 1896 in 1924 that company became International Business Machines Corporation or IBM

First-Generation Computers

1930s - 1940s vacuum tubes used as switches large computers extremely slow by today's standards prone to frequent failure includes the ABC, Mark I, ENIAC, UNIVAC, and others of similar design

Mark I

1944 electromechanical computer Howard Aiken first real analytical engine based on relays

von Neumann Architecture

1945 developed stored program concept - both programs and data stored in same memory modern computers said to use this worked on the ENIAC doing Atomic bomb simulations

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator)

1946 best known as first fully electronic computer 18,000 vacuum tubes 1,500 relays 20*40 foot rooms low reliability, lots of power, air conditioning six women did the bulk of the programming

Second-Generation Computers

1950s -- mid-1960s transistors used as switches smaller than vacuum-tube-buklt computers as much as a thousand times faster than first-generation computers more reliable and less expensive

Fourth-Generation Computers

1970s to present complete computer on a chip radical change in the appearance, capability and availability of computers

Fifth Generation?

2001 - Present Multiple CPUs on one chip - multicore processing

Unicode

a 16-bit character encoding scheme allowing characters from Western European, Eastern European, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Urdu, Hindi, and all other major world languages, living and dead, to be encoded in a single character set - makes the file twice as big so it takes up double the memory

Table (data file)

a collection of related records

Field

a combination of one or more related character - field name - field size - data type

Server

a computer dedicated to providing one or more services to other computers or devices on a network

Handheld

a computer small enough to fit in one hand

Terminal

a computer, usually with limited processing power, that enables users to send data to and/or receive information from a server, or host computer most retail stores use POS to record purchases, process credit or debit cards, and update inventory

Primary Key

a field that uniquely identifies each record

Record

a group of related fields

Byte

a grouping of 8 bits of information

Mainframe

a large, expensive, powerful server that can handle hundreds or thousands of connected users simultaneously - used by large organizations, such as banks and airlines, for big computing jobs - communicate with mainframe through terminals - multiple communications at one time through process of timesharing

Desktop

a personal computer designed to be in a stationary location, where all of its components fit on or under a desk or table

Mobile Computer

a portable personal computer, designed so that a user easily can carry it from place to place

Multi-Core Processor

a single chip with two or more separate processor cores

Expansion Slot

a socket on a desktop or server motherboard that can hold and adapter card

Embedded Computer

a special-purpose computer that functions as a component in a larger product - controlling the temperature and humidity - monitoring your heart rate - monitoring your house security system

DBMS (Database Management System)

a system that allows users to - create a computerized database - add, modify, and delete data - sort and retrieve data - create forms and reports from the data

Binary Number System

a system that denotes all numbers and combinations of two digits

MB (megabyte)

about 1 million bytes of information = 1024 KB

GB (gigabyte)

about 1 million bytes of information = 1024 MB

TB (terabyte)

about 1 million megabytes of information = 1024 GB

K (kilobyte)

about 1,000 bytes of information - technically 1024 bytes equals 1 *** of storage

Bus

allows the various devices both inside and attached to the system unit to communicate with one another

Instruction Set

built-in every processor the vocabulary of instructions that only the processor can execute

Flash Memory

can be erased electronically and rewritten -CMOS technology uses battery power to retain information when the power to the computer is off

Memory

consists of electronic components that store instructions waiting to be executed by the processor, data needed by those instructions, and the results of processing the data stores 3 basic categories of items - the operating system and other programs - applications - data being processed and the resulting information

Computer Chip

contains integrated circuits

System Clock

controls the timing of all computer operations

Nonvolatile Memory

does not lose contents when power is removed - ROM, flash memory, and CMOS

Adapter Card

enhancer functions of a component of a desktop or server system unit and/or provides connections to peripherals - sound card and video card

Konrad Zuse

in 1939, built the first programmable, general-purpose digital computer computer was bombed in the bombing of Berlin his computer was built from electric relays to automate engineering calculations "I was too lazy to calculate and so I invented the computer"

Moore's Law

in 1965, predicted that the power of a silicon chip of the same price would double about every 2 years for the next 10 years

Alan Turing

influenced the group responsible for building the Colossus a member of the team which broke the Enigma code used by Nazi Germany in WWII the "Grandfather of computer science"

CPU (central processing unit)

interprets and carries out the basic instructions that operate a computer - interprets and executes instructions - performs arithmetic and logical data manipulations - communicates with the other parts of the computer system

Third-Generation Computers

late 1960s hundreds of transistors packed into a single integrated circuit on a silicon chip dramatic reduction in size and cost significant increases in reliability, speed, and efficiently mass production techniques to manufacture chips inexpensively

Volatile Memory

loses its contents when power is turned off - RAM

Modern Computers 2 Main Streams of Evolution

mechanization of arithmetic (calculating machines -- hardware) concept of stored programs (process control -- software)

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)

most widely used code, represents each character as a unique 8-bit code

Laptop

notebook computer a thin, lightweight mobile computer with a screen in its lid and a keyboard in its base

Characters

one byte - numbers, letters, space, punctuation marks, or other symbols

ABC

one of the first computers John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry small scale - 300 vacuum tubes

The Abacus

origin unknown used by the Chinese 3 to 4 thousand years ago

Registers

part of the processor temporarily holds data and instructions

ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit)

performs arithmetic, comparison, and other operations

Storage

permanent

Word Size

processor speed

4 Basic Functions of Computers

receive input process information produce output store information

ROM (Read-Only Memory)

refers to memory chip storing permanent data and instructions

Integrated Circuit Benefits

reliability, size, speed, efficiency, cost

Analog

signals are continuous and vary in strength and quality

Digital

signals are in one of two states: on or off

Liebniz Calculator (Gottfried WIlhelm von Liebniz)

similar to Pascal's design add, subtract, multiply divide more reliable and accurate still inaccurate he also invented calculus

Bit

smallest unit of information

Memory Cache

speeds the processes of the computer because it stores frequently used instructions and data

Relational Database

stores data in multiple tables that are linked via a relationship using a common field

Memory

temporary

Access Time

the amount of time it take the processor to read from memory - measured in nanoseconds

Control Unit

the component of the processor that directs and coordinates most of the operations in the computer

Plug and Play

the computer automatically can recognize peripheral devices as you install them

Backward Compatible

the design of CPUs in the same family

Supercomputer

the fastest, most powerful computer - and the most expensive - capable of processing many trillions of instructions in a single second

Motherboard

the main circuit board of the computer

GHz (Gigahertz)

the measure of clock speed

Word Size

the number of bits the processor can interpret and execute at a given time

Clock Speed

the pace of the system clock

WWII

the period of human history when electronic computers were developed

Konrad Zuse, John Atanasoff, Howard Aiken, John Mauchly & J. Presper Eckert

the scientists and mathematicians who designed and built the first working computers

RAM Chips

usually reside on a memory module and are inserted in to memory slots