SIMPLE PAST TENSE HISTORY OF COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

THE PAST TENSE  -  Brief history of computer architecture

1943-46 - ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) by J. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, first general purpose electronic computer The size of its numerical word was 10 decimal digits, and it could perform 5000 additions and 357 multiplications per second.

Built to calculate trajectories for ballistic shells during WWII, programmed by setting switches and plugging & unplugging cables. It used 18,000 tubes, weighted 30 tones and consumed 160
kilowatts of electrical power.

1951 - UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) - the first commercial computer, built by Eckert and Mauchly, cost – around $1 million, 46 machines sold.

UNIVAC had an add time of 120 microseconds, multiply time of 1,800 microseconds and a divide time of 3,600 microseconds, used magnetic tape as input.

1953 - IBM's 701, the first commercially successful general-purpose computer. The 701 had electrostatic storage tube memory, used magnetic tape to store information, and had binary, fixed-point, single address hardware.

IBM 650 - 1st mass-produced computer (450 machines sold in one year)



Source: by Elissaveta Arnaoudova in www.mgnet.org

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COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE


In computer science, computer architecture or digital computer organization is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and functional description of requirements and design implementations for the various parts of a computer.
It is also defined as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals.
Computer architecture has three main subcategories:

1- Instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the abstract image of a computing system that is a machine language (or assembly language) programmer, including the instruction set, word size, memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats.

2- Microarchitecture, also Computer organization is a lower level, more concrete and detailed, description of the system. There are constituent parts of the system interconnected and they interoperate in order to implement the ISA. The size of a computer's cache for instance, is an organizational issue.

3. System Design: it is all of the other hardware components within a computing system such as:

--System interconnects such as computer buses and switches

-- Memory controllers and hierarchies

--CPU off-load mechanisms such as direct memory access (DMA)

--Issues like multiprocessing.

Adapted from http://www.wikipedia.org/, Abril 2010