ADVANCES IN COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

Today, it is incredible to consider that in 1969 men landed on the moon using a computer with a 32-kilobyte memory, that was only programmable by the use of punch cards. In 1973, Astronaut Alan Shepherd participated in the first computer "hack" while orbiting the moon in his landing vehicle, as two programmers back on Earth attempted to "hack" into the duplicate computer, to find a way for Shepherd to convince his computer that a catastrophe requiring a mission abort was not happening; the successful hack took 45 minutes to accomplish, and Shepherd went on to hit his golf ball on the moon. Today, the average computer sitting on the desk of a suburban home office has more computing power than the entire U.S. space program that put humans on another world (Rheingold, 2000, p. 4).

Computer science has affected the human condition in many radical ways. Throughout its history, its developers have striven to make calculation and computation easier, as well as to offer new means by which the other sciences can be advanced. Modern massively-paralleled supercomputers help scientists with previously unfeasible problems such as fluid dynamics, complex function convergence, finite element analysis and realtime weather dynamics. Likewise, our daily lives are increasingly affected by computers, not only alleviating us from menial

tasks but making it possible for us to accomplish more (Rheingold, 2000, p. 7).

The personal computer (PC) has revolutionized business an

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successful digital computer was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). ENIAC's speedup in multiplication over the Harvard machine developed by Aiken was roughly 500 to 1. This speedup doomed the electromechanical approach to creating a computer (Goldstine, 1972, p. 117). By the time ENIAC was complete, the design had expanded from one containing 5,000 vacuum tubes, to one which contained 18,000 vacuum tubes of 16 basic types, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors; it was 8 ft high, 3 ft wide, almost 100 ft long, weighed 30 tons, and consumed 140 kilowatts of power. ENIAC was used for the first computerized weather forecasts as well as ballistic calculations (Williams, 1985, p. 276). The requirement that computers be large mechanical structures with thousands of vacuum tubes became obsolete with the invention of the transistor in 1947 by John Bardeen (19081991), Walter Brattain (19021987), and William Shockley (19101989), which transformed the computer as it then existed and made possible the microprocessor revolution. For this discovery they won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics (Williams, 1985, p. 339). Jay Forrester (b. 1918) invented magnetic core memory in 1949. Jack Kilby of Texas Ins

Category: History - A