Computer

For the IEEE magazine see Computer (magazine)

A computer is a Machine designed for manipulating Data according to a list of Instructions known as a Program .

Computers are versatile. In fact, they are ''universal'' information-processing machines. According to the Church-Turing Thesis , a computer with a certain minimum threshold capability is in principle capable of performing the tasks of ''any'' other computer, from those of a Personal Digital Assistant to a Supercomputer , as long as time and memory capacity are not considerations. Therefore, the same computer designs may be adapted for tasks ranging from processing company payrolls to controlling Unmanned Spaceflights . Due to technological advancement, modern electronic computers are exponentially more capable than those of preceding generations (a phenomenon partially described by Moore's Law ).

Computers take numerous physical forms. Early electronic computers were the size of a large room, and such enormous computing facilities still exist for specialized Scientific computation — Supercomputer s — and for the Transaction Processing requirements of large companies, generally called Mainframe s. Smaller computers for individual use, called Personal Computer s, and their portable equivalent, the Laptop Computer , are ubiquitous information-processing and Communication tools and are perhaps what most non-experts think of as "a computer". However, the most common form of computer in use today is the Embedded Computer , small computers used to control another device. Embedded computers control machines from Fighter Aircraft to Digital Camera s.

HISTORY OF COMPUTING

See Also: History of computing

— a milestone in computing history]]
Originally, the term "computer" referred to a Person Who Performed Numerical Calculations , possibly with the aid of a Mechanical Calculating Device . Examples of early calculating devices, the first ancestors of the computer, included the Abacus and the Antikythera Mechanism , an Ancient Greek device for calculating the movements of Planet s, dating from about 87 BC.¹ The end of the Middle Ages saw a reinvigoration of Europe an mathematics and engineering, and Wilhelm Schickard 's 1623 device was the first of a number of European engineers to construct a mechanical calculator.² The Abacus has been noted as being an early computer, as it was like a calculator in the past.
Charles Babbage was the first to conceptualize and design a fully programmable computer as early as 1820, but due to a combination of the limits of the technology of the time, limited finance, and an inability to resist tinkering with his design, the device was never actually constructed in his lifetime. A number of technologies that would later prove useful in computing, such as the Punch Card and the Vacuum Tube had appeared by the end of the 19th century, and large-scale automated data processing using punch cards was performed by tabulating machines designed by Hermann Hollerith .

During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated, special-purpose Analog Computer s, which used a direct mechanical or Electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation. These became increasingly rare after the development of the programmable digital computer.

A succession of steadily more powerful and flexible computing devices were constructed in the 1930s and 1940s, gradually adding the key features of modern computers, such as the use of digital electronics (largely invented by (1937), a special-purpose machine that used valve-driven (vacuum tube) computation, Binary numbers, and regenerative memory; the secret British Colossus Computer (1944), which had limited programmability but demonstrated that a device using thousands of valves could be made reliable and reprogrammed electronically; the Harvard Mark I , a large-scale electromechanical computer with limited programmability (1944); the decimal-based American ENIAC (1946) — which was the first ''general purpose'' electronic computer, but originally had an inflexible architecture that meant reprogramming it essentially required it to be rewired; and Konrad Zuse 's Z machines, with the electromechanical Z3 (1941) being the first working machine featuring automatic binary arithmetic and feasible programmability.

The team who developed ENIAC, recognizing its flaws, came up with a far more flexible and elegant design, which has become known as the Von Neumann Architecture (or "stored program architecture"), named for one of its principle designers. This stored program architecture became the basis for virtually all modern computers. A number of projects to develop computers based on the stored program architecture commenced in the mid to late-1940s; the first of these were completed in Britain. The first to be up and running was the Small-Scale Experimental Machine , but the EDSAC was perhaps the first practical version that was developed.

, an early personal computer]]

Valve (tube) driven computer designs were in use throughout the 1950s, but were eventually replaced with Transistor -based computers, which were smaller, faster, cheaper, and much more reliable, thus allowing them to be commercially produced, in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the adoption of Integrated Circuit technology had enabled computers to be produced at a low enough cost to allow individuals to own a Personal Computer of the type familiar today.

HOW COMPUTERS WORK: THE STORED PROGRAM ARCHITECTURE

While the technologies used in computers have changed dramatically since the first electronic, general-purpose, computers of the 1940s, most still use the Stored Program Architecture (sometimes called the von Neumann architecture]). The design made the universal computer a practical reality.

The architecture describes a computer with four main sections: the Arithmetic And Logic Unit (ALU), the Control Circuitry , the Memory , and the input and output devices (collectively termed I/O). These parts are interconnected by bundles of wires (called " Bus es" when the same bundle supports more than one data path) and are usually driven by a timer or Clock (although other Event s could drive the control circuitry).

Conceptually, a computer's memory can be viewed as a list of cells. Each cell has a numbered "address" and can store a small, fixed amount of information. This information can either be an instruction, telling the computer what to do, or data, the information which the computer is to process using the instructions that have been placed in the memory. In principle, any cell can be used to store either instructions or data.

The ALU is in many senses the heart of the computer. It is capable of performing two classes of basic operations. The first is arithmetic operations; for instance, adding or subtracting two numbers together. The set of arithmetic operations may be very limited; indeed, some designs do not directly support multiplication and division operations (instead, users support multiplication and division through programs that perform multiple additions, subtractions, and other digit manipulations). The second class of ALU operations involves ''comparison'' operations: given two numbers, determining if they are equal, or if not equal which is larger.

The I/O systems are the means by which the computer receives information from the outside world, and reports its results back to that world. On a typical personal computer, input devices include objects like the keyboard and Mouse , and output devices include Computer Monitor s, Printer s and the like, but as will be discussed later a huge variety of devices can be connected to a computer and serve as I/O devices.

The control system ties this all together. Its job is to read instructions and data from memory or the I/O devices, decode the instructions, providing the ALU with the correct inputs according to the instructions, "tell" the ALU what operation to perform on those inputs, and send the results back to the memory or to the I/O devices. One key component of the control system is a counter that keeps track of what the address of the current instruction is; typically, this is incremented each time an instruction is executed, unless the instruction itself indicates that the next instruction should be at some other location (allowing the computer to repeatedly execute the same instructions).

Since the 1980s the ALU and control unit (collectively called a Central Processing Unit or CPU) have typically been located on a single Integrated Circuit called a Microprocessor .

The functioning of such a computer is in principle quite straightforward. Typically, on each clock cycle, the computer fetches instructions and data from its memory. The instructions are executed, the results are stored, and the next instruction is fetched. This procedure repeats until a ''halt'' instruction is encountered.

The set of instructions interpreted by the control unit, and executed by the ALU, are limited in number, precisely defined, and very simple operations. Broadly, they fit into one or more of of four categories: 1) moving data from one location to another (an example might be an instruction that "tells" the CPU to "copy the contents of memory cell 5 and place the copy in cell 10"; 2) executing arithmetic and logical processes on data (for instance, "add the contents of cell 7 to the contents of cell 13 and place the result in cell 20" 3) testing the condition of data ("if the contents of cell 999 are 0, the next instruction is at cell 30") 4) altering the sequence of operations (the previous example alters the sequence of operations, but instructions such as "the next instruction is at cell 100" are also standard).

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