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What is a “computer generation”? Generation 1: Tube
In our era of multiprocessing and distributed computing, the once seemingly important division of computers into generations has already been forgotten a little. The first generation is tube computers, the second is transistor computers, the third is integrated circuit computers, and the fourth is microprocessor-based computers.
In the beginning there were ferrite rings and electron tubes. The direct access memory, or RAM, which was called RAM (the random access memory, or simply “memory”) as a girl, consisted of ferrite rings. Each ring was stitched with several windings. The write current went along one, the read current on the Continue reading
What is Rear Admiral Grace Hopper famous for?
Grace Hopper was an excellent mathematician and one of the first “encoders”, so-called programmers. In the mid-twentieth century, she, as an officer of the US Navy, like everyone who was “close” to computers, worked at Harvard in the department that was engaged in obtaining ballistic tables for artillery tasks.
So Grace Hopper is considered one of the first programmers in the world: she worked on the computer of Mark I, the former, in fact, a giant calculator. The giant Mark I was intended for the computational processes of obtaining artillery ballistic tables, in the already written algorithm, mathematical tasks (modules) of a general nature were provided. Hopper and her colleagues (by the way, there were much more female programmers involved in coding than men) coped with this – they first applied Continue reading
Who are the first hackers?
Interestingly, modern schoolchildren and students of technical universities realize that the history of computers did not begin with Bill Gates, and the first hackers did not hack servers, and wrote … games for entertainment?
Let’s start from the middle, because for a correct logical narrative, one would have to start from the 50s of the last century. And today, few will master this information, and not because it’s boring, but because it’s all such junk, the first “humanized” programming languages Beisk, Fortran, Kobol and even Pascal existing today. They are as ancient as the real human languages, Latin and ancient Greek, and, thank Continue reading
