Computer
Computer
Computer
supervision.
Their hard work, sincere effort and Keen interest regarding the project
and heartful thanks to all those who encouraged, guided and helped
project report and for directing and guiding my work and providing
to my family members and all friends for their moral support and
encouragement.
Puneet Shrimali
Computer
The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th
century (1940–1945), although the computer concept and various machines similar to
computers existed earlier. Early electronic computers were the size of a large room,
consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers (PC).[1]
Modern computers are based on tiny integrated circuits and are millions to billions of
times more capable while occupying a fraction of the space.[2] Today, simple computers
may be made small enough to fit into a wristwatch and be powered from a watch battery.
Personal computers, in various forms, are icons of the Information Age and are what
most people think of as "a computer"; however, the most common form of computer in
use today is the embedded computer. Embedded computers are small, simple devices that
are used to control other devices — for example, they may be found in machines ranging
from fighter aircraft to industrial robots, digital cameras, and children's toys.
Contents
1 History of computing
2 Stored program architecture
o 2.1 Programs
o 2.2 Example
3 How computers work
o 3.1 Control unit
o 3.2 Arithmetic/logic unit (ALU)
o 3.3 Memory
o 3.4 Input/output (I/O)
o 3.5 Multitasking
o 3.6 Multiprocessing
o 3.7 Networking and the Internet
4 Further topics
o 4.1 Hardware
o 4.2 Software
o 4.3 Programming languages
o 4.4 Professions and organizations
History of computing
It is difficult to identify any one device as the earliest computer, partly because
the term "computer" has been subject to varying interpretations over time. Originally, the
term "computer" referred to a person who performed numerical calculations (a human
computer), often with the aid of a mechanical calculating device.
The history of the modern computer begins with two separate technologies - that
of automated calculation and that of programmability.
Examples of early mechanical calculating devices included the abacus, the slide
rule and arguably the astrolabe and the Antikythera mechanism (which dates from about
150-100 BC). Hero of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD) built a mechanical theater which
performed a play lasting 10 minutes and was operated by a complex system of ropes and
drums that might be considered to be a means of deciding which parts of the mechanism
performed which actions and when. This is the essence of programmability.
The end of the Middle Ages saw a re-invigoration of European mathematics and
engineering, and Wilhelm Schickard's 1623 device was the first of a number of
mechanical calculators constructed by European engineers. However, none of those
devices fit the modern definition of a computer because they could not be programmed.
In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard made an improvement to the textile loom that
used a series of punched paper cards as a template to allow his loom to weave intricate
patterns automatically. The resulting Jacquard loom was an important step in the
development of computers because the use of punched cards to define woven patterns can
be viewed as an early, albeit limited, form of programmability.
It was the fusion of automatic calculation with programmability that produced the
first recognizable computers. In 1837, Charles Babbage was the first to conceptualize and
design a fully programmable mechanical computer that he called "The Analytical
Engine".[7] Due to limited finances, and an inability to resist tinkering with the design,
Babbage never actually built his Analytical Engine.
Large-scale automated data processing of punched cards was performed for the
U.S. Census in 1890 by tabulating machines designed by Herman Hollerith and
manufactured by the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, which later became
IBM. By the end of the 19th century a number of technologies that would later prove
useful in the realization of practical computers had begun to appear: the punched card,
Boolean algebra, the vacuum tube (thermionic valve) and the teleprinter.
During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were
met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or
electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation. However, these were not
programmable and generally lacked the versatility and accuracy of modern digital
computers.
Several developers of ENIAC, recognizing its flaws, came up with a far more
flexible and elegant design, which came to be known as the "stored program architecture"
or von Neumann architecture. This design was first formally described by John von
Neumann in the paper First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, distributed in 1945. A
number of projects to develop computers based on the stored-program architecture
commenced around this time, the first of these being completed in Great Britain. The first
to be demonstrated working was the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine
(SSEM or "Baby"), while the EDSAC, completed a year after SSEM, was the first
practical implementation of the stored program design. Shortly thereafter, the machine
originally described by von Neumann's paper—EDVAC—was completed but did not see
full-time use for an additional two years.
Microprocessors are miniaturized devices that often implement stored program CPUs.
Computers that used vacuum tubes as their electronic elements were in use
throughout the 1950s. Vacuum tube electronics were largely replaced in the 1960s by
transistor-based electronics, which are smaller, faster, cheaper to produce, require less
power, and are more reliable. In the 1970s, integrated circuit technology and the
subsequent creation of microprocessors, such as the Intel 4004, further decreased size and
cost and further increased speed and reliability of computers. By the 1980s, computers
became sufficiently small and cheap to replace simple mechanical controls in domestic
appliances such as washing machines. The 1980s also witnessed home computers and the
now ubiquitous personal computer. With the evolution of the Internet, personal
computers are becoming as common as the television and the telephone in the household.
In most cases, computer instructions are simple: add one number to another, move
some data from one location to another, send a message to some external device, etc.
These instructions are read from the computer's memory and are generally carried out
(executed) in the order they were given. However, there are usually specialized
instructions to tell the computer to jump ahead or backwards to some other place in the
program and to carry on executing from there. These are called "jump" instructions (or
branches). Furthermore, jump instructions may be made to happen conditionally so that
different sequences of instructions may be used depending on the result of some previous
calculation or some external event. Many computers directly support subroutines by
providing a type of jump that "remembers" the location it jumped from and another
instruction to return to the instruction following that jump instruction.
However, computers cannot "think" for themselves in the sense that they only
solve problems in exactly the way they are programmed to. An intelligent human faced
with the above addition task might soon realize that instead of actually adding up all the
numbers one can simply use the equation and arrive at the correct answer (500,500) with
little work. In other words, a computer programmed to add up the numbers one by one as
in the example above would do exactly that without regard to efficiency or alternative
solutions.
Programs
A 1970s punched card containing one line from a FORTRAN program. The card reads: "Z(1) = Y + W(1)"
and is labelled "PROJ039" for identification purposes.
In practical terms, a computer program may run from just a few instructions to
many millions of instructions, as in a program for a word processor or a web browser. A
typical modern computer can execute billions of instructions per second (gigahertz or
GHz) and rarely make a mistake over many years of operation. Large computer programs
comprising several million instructions may take teams of programmers years to write,
thus the probability of the entire program having been written without error is highly
unlikely.
Errors in computer programs are called "bugs". Bugs may be benign and not
affect the usefulness of the program, or have only subtle effects. But in some cases they
may cause the program to "hang" - become unresponsive to input such as mouse clicks or
keystrokes, or to completely fail or "crash". Otherwise benign bugs may sometimes may
be harnessed for malicious intent by an unscrupulous user writing an "exploit" - code
designed to take advantage of a bug and disrupt a program's proper execution. Bugs are
usually not the fault of the computer. Since computers merely execute the instructions
they are given, bugs are nearly always the result of programmer error or an oversight
made in the program's design.
In most computers, individual instructions are stored as machine code with each
instruction being given a unique number (its operation code or opcode for short). The
command to add two numbers together would have one opcode, the command to multiply
them would have a different opcode and so on. The simplest computers are able to
perform any of a handful of different instructions; the more complex computers have
several hundred to choose from—each with a unique numerical code. Since the
computer's memory is able to store numbers, it can also store the instruction codes. This
leads to the important fact that entire programs (which are just lists of instructions) can be
represented as lists of numbers and can themselves be manipulated inside the computer
just as if they were numeric data. The fundamental concept of storing programs in the
computer's memory alongside the data they operate on is the crux of the von Neumann,
or stored program, architecture. In some cases, a computer might store some or all of its
program in memory that is kept separate from the data it operates on. This is called the
Harvard architecture after the Harvard Mark I computer. Modern von Neumann
computers display some traits of the Harvard architecture in their designs, such as in CPU
caches.
While it is possible to write computer programs as long lists of numbers (machine
language) and this technique was used with many early computers, it is extremely tedious
to do so in practice, especially for complicated programs. Instead, each basic instruction
can be given a short name that is indicative of its function and easy to remember—a
mnemonic such as ADD, SUB, MULT or JUMP. These mnemonics are collectively
known as a computer's assembly language. Converting programs written in assembly
language into something the computer can actually understand (machine language) is
usually done by a computer program called an assembler. Machine languages and the
assembly languages that represent them (collectively termed low-level programming
languages) tend to be unique to a particular type of computer. For instance, an ARM
architecture computer (such as may be found in a PDA or a hand-held videogame) cannot
understand the machine language of an Intel Pentium or the AMD Athlon 64 computer
that might be in a PC.
Example
Suppose a computer is being employed to drive a traffic light. A simple stored program
might say:
With this set of instructions, the computer would cycle the light continually
through red, green, yellow and back to red again until told to stop running the program.
However, suppose there is a simple on/off switch connected to the computer that
is intended to be used to make the light flash red while some maintenance operation is
being performed. The program might then instruct the computer to:
In this manner, the computer is either running the instructions from number (2) to (11)
over and over or its running the instructions from (11) down to (16) over and over,
depending on the position of the switch.
The control unit, ALU, registers, and basic I/O (and often other hardware closely
linked with these) are collectively known as a central processing unit (CPU). Early CPUs
were composed of many separate components but since the mid-1970s CPUs have
typically been constructed on a single integrated circuit called a microprocessor.
Control unit
The control unit (often called a control system or central controller) directs the
various components of a computer. It reads and interprets (decodes) instructions in the
program one by one. The control system decodes each instruction and turns it into a
series of control signals that operate the other parts of the computer. [16] Control systems in
advanced computers may change the order of some instructions so as to improve
performance.
A key component common to all CPUs is the program counter, a special memory
cell (a register) that keeps track of which location in memory the next instruction is to be
read from.
Since the program counter is (conceptually) just another set of memory cells, it
can be changed by calculations done in the ALU. Adding 100 to the program counter
would cause the next instruction to be read from a place 100 locations further down the
program. Instructions that modify the program counter are often known as "jumps" and
allow for loops (instructions that are repeated by the computer) and often conditional
instruction execution (both examples of control flow).
It is noticeable that the sequence of operations that the control unit goes through
to process an instruction is in itself like a short computer program - and indeed, in some
more complex CPU designs, there is another yet smaller computer called a
microsequencer that runs a microcode program that causes all of these events to happen.
Logic operations involve Boolean logic: AND, OR, XOR and NOT. These can be
useful both for creating complicated conditional statements and processing boolean logic.
Superscalar computers contain multiple ALUs so that they can process several
instructions at the same time. Graphics processors and computers with SIMD and MIMD
features often provide ALUs that can perform arithmetic on vectors and matrices.
Memory
Magnetic core memory was popular main memory for computers through the
1960s until it was completely replaced by semiconductor memory.
A computer's memory can be viewed as a list of cells into which numbers can be
placed or read. Each cell has a numbered "address" and can store a single number. The
computer can be instructed to "put the number 123 into the cell numbered 1357" or to
"add the number that is in cell 1357 to the number that is in cell 2468 and put the answer
into cell 1595". The information stored in memory may represent practically anything.
Letters, numbers, even computer instructions can be placed into memory with equal ease.
Since the CPU does not differentiate between different types of information, it is up to
the software to give significance to what the memory sees as nothing but a series of
numbers.
In almost all modern computers, each memory cell is set up to store binary
numbers in groups of eight bits (called a byte). Each byte is able to represent 256
different numbers; either from 0 to 255 or -128 to +127. To store larger numbers, several
consecutive bytes may be used (typically, two, four or eight). When negative numbers are
required, they are usually stored in two's complement notation. Other arrangements are
possible, but are usually not seen outside of specialized applications or historical
contexts. A computer can store any kind of information in memory as long as it can be
somehow represented in numerical form. Modern computers have billions or even
trillions of bytes of memory.
The CPU contains a special set of memory cells called registers that can be read
and written to much more rapidly than the main memory area. There are typically
between two and one hundred registers depending on the type of CPU. Registers are used
for the most frequently needed data items to avoid having to access main memory every
time data is needed. Since data is constantly being worked on, reducing the need to
access main memory (which is often slow compared to the ALU and control units)
greatly increases the computer's speed.
Computer main memory comes in two principal varieties: random access memory
or RAM and read-only memory or ROM. RAM can be read and written to anytime the
CPU commands it, but ROM is pre-loaded with data and software that never changes, so
the CPU can only read from it. ROM is typically used to store the computer's initial start-
up instructions. In general, the contents of RAM is erased when the power to the
computer is turned off while ROM retains its data indefinitely. In a PC , the ROM
contains a specialized program called the BIOS that orchestrates loading the computer's
operating system from the hard disk drive into RAM whenever the computer is turned on
or reset. In embedded computers, which frequently do not have disk drives, all of the
software required to perform the task may be stored in ROM. Software that is stored in
ROM is often called firmware because it is notionally more like hardware than software.
Flash memory blurs the distinction between ROM and RAM by retaining data when
turned off but being rewritable like RAM. However, flash memory is typically much
slower than conventional ROM and RAM so its use is restricted to applications where
high speeds are not required.
In more sophisticated computers there may be one or more RAM cache memories
which are slower than registers but faster than main memory. Generally computers with
this sort of cache are designed to move frequently needed data into the cache
automatically, often without the need for any intervention on the programmer's part.
Input/output (I/O)
I/O is the means by which a computer receives information from the outside
world and sends results back. Devices that provide input or output to the computer are
called peripherals. On a typical personal computer, peripherals include input devices like
the keyboard and mouse, and output devices such as the display and printer. Hard disk
drives, floppy disk drives and optical disc drives serve as both input and output devices.
Computer networking is another form of I/O. Often, I/O devices are complex computers
in their own right with their own CPU and memory. A graphics processing unit might
contain fifty or more tiny computers that perform the calculations necessary to display
3D graphics[citation needed]. Modern desktop computers contain many smaller computers that
assist the main CPU in performing I/O.
Multitasking
Before the era of cheap computers, the principle use for multitasking was to allow many
people to share the same computer.