Historical Developments

-Tutorial 1-

1. These people had an important impact in the history of computing and The School of
Computing and Mathematics named several labs after them:

 Charles Babbage (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English

mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer. He originated
the concept of a digital programmable computer and in the period 1847-1849
and completes 21 drawings for the second version of the Difference Engine,
but does not finishes the construction.

 George Boole (2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was an

English mathematician, educator, philosopher and logician. He worked in the
fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the
author of The Laws of Thought (1854) which contains Boolean algebra, that
describes a system for symbolic and logical reasoning that will become the
basis for computer design.

 Augusta Ada, the Countess of Lovelace (December 1815 – 27 November

1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work
on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer,
the Analytical Engine. In the period 1842-1843, she translates Luigi
Menabrea’s pamphlet on the Analytical Engine, adding her own commentary
to his work.

2. The technological ‘ages’ of electronic computing are defined by the next discoveries:
 The Vacuum Tube
Sir John Ambrose Fleming (1849–1945) was an English electrical
engineer and physicist, known primarily for inventing in 1904 the
first vacuum tube. It was also called a thermionic valve, vacuum diode,
kenotron, thermionic tube, or Fleming valve In the 1904 Fleming was
granted a GB patent No 24850 for Improvements in Instruments for
Detecting and Measuring Alternating Electric Currents for the
prototype of vacuum tube, next year he received a US patent for the
same device. With this advance, the age of modern wireless
electronics is born.

 Transistor Age
In 1947, the transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories (now Lucent
Technologies).
Like the vacuum tube, the transistor could be used to amplify a signal.
Thus, small transistor radios (like the radios you see in old TV shows)
soon replaced the old large, tube-based radios associated with the
Golden Age of Radio. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s,
transistors became smaller and smaller. Many of the
large mainframe computers that had been required to meet the
computer needs of a large company were replaced
 by minicomputers. Today, transistors are microscopic: millions of
transistors can be put in a silicon chip the size of a postage stamp!

 Integrated Circuit Age

The idea of integrating electronic circuits into a single device was born
when the German physicist and engineer Werner
Jacobi (de) developed and patented the first known integrated
transistor amplifier in 1949 and the British radio engineer Geoffrey
Dummer proposed to integrate a variety of standard electronic
components in a monolithic semiconductor crystal in 1952. A year
later, Harwick Johnson filed a patent for a prototype integrated
circuit (IC).

3. The Turing machine

A Turing machine is a hypothetical machine thought of by the mathematician Alan Turing in
1936. Despite its simplicity, the machine can simulate ANY computer algorithm, no matter
how complicated it is. It consists of an infinitely-long tape which acts like the memory in a
typical computer, or any other form of data storage. The squares on the tape are usually
blank at the start and can be written with symbols. In this case, the machine can only
process the symbols 0 and 1 and " " (blank), and is thus said to be a 3-symbol Turing
machine.

4. The purpose and important features of a Turing Test:

Common understanding of the purpose of the Turing Test is not specifically to
determine whether a computer is able to fool an interrogator into believing that it is a
human, but rather whether a computer could imitate a human.