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IAS Machine
The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. It is sometimes called the von Neumann machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a mathematics professor at both Princeton University and IAS. The computer was built under his direction, starting in 1946 and finished in 1951. The general organization is called von Neumann architecture, even though it was both conceived and implemented by others. The computer is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History but is not currently on display. History Julian Bigelow was hired as chief engineer in May 1946. Ralph J. Slutz, Hewitt Crane, Herman Goldstine, Gerald Estrin, Arthur Burks, George W. Brown and Willis Ware also worked on the project. The machine was in limited operation in the summer of 1951 and fully operational on June 10, 1952. It was in operation until July 15, 1958. Descripti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Von Neumann
John von Neumann ( ; ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. Von Neumann had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, integrating Basic research, pure and Applied science#Applied research, applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. He was a pioneer in building the mathematical framework of quantum physics, in the development of functional analysis, and in game theory, introducing or codifying concepts including Cellular automaton, cellular automata, the Von Neumann universal constructor, universal constructor and the Computer, digital computer. His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA. During World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project. He developed the mathematical models behind the explosive lense ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Burks
Arthur Walter Burks (October 13, 1915 – May 14, 2008) was an American mathematician who worked in the 1940s as a senior engineer on the project that contributed to the design of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Decades later, Burks and his wife Alice Burks outlined their case for the subject matter of the ENIAC having been derived from John Vincent Atanasoff. Burks was also for several decades a faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Early life and education Burks was born in Duluth, Minnesota. He earned his B.A. in mathematics and physics from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1936 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1937 and 1941, respectively. The Moore School The summer after obtaining his Ph.D., Burks moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and enrolled in the national defense electronics course offered by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Elec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AVIDAC
The AVIDAC or ''Argonne Version of the Institute's Digital Automatic Computer'', an early computer built by Argonne National Laboratory, was partially based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann John von Neumann ( ; ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. Von Neumann had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, in .... It was built by the Laboratory's Physics Division for $250,000 and began operations on January 28, 1953. As with almost all computers of its era, it was a one-of-a-kind machine that could not exchange programs with other computers (even other IAS machines). See also * List of vacuum-tube computers References External links * * IAS architecture computers {{microcompu-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Von Neumann Architecture
The von Neumann architecture—also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture—is a computer architecture based on the '' First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', written by John von Neumann in 1945, describing designs discussed with John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The document describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer made of "organs" that were later understood to have these components: * A processing unit with both an arithmetic logic unit and processor registers * A control unit that includes an instruction register and a program counter * Memory that stores data and instructions * External mass storage * Input and output mechanisms.. The attribution of the invention of the architecture to von Neumann is controversial, not least because Eckert and Mauchly had done a lot of the required design work and claim to have had the idea for stored programs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MESM
MESM ( Ukrainian: MEOM, Мала Електронна Обчислювальна Машина; Russian: МЭСМ, Малая Электронно-Счетная Машина; 'Small Electronic Calculating Machine') was the first universally programmable electronic computer in the Soviet Union. By some authors it was also depicted as the first one in continental Europe, even though the electromechanical computers Zuse Z4 and the Swedish BARK preceded it. Overview MESM was created by a team of scientists under the direction of Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev from the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in the Ukrainian SSR, at Feofaniya (near Kyiv). Initially, MESM was conceived as a layout or model of a Large Electronic Calculating Machine and letter "M" in the title meant "model" (prototype). Work on the machine was research in nature, in order to experimentally test the principles of constructing universal digital computers. After the first successes and in order to meet the ext ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manchester Baby
The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic Calland Williams, Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948. The Baby was not intended to be a practical computing engine, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Described as "small and primitive" 50 years after its creation, it was the first working machine to contain all the elements essential to a modern electronic digital computer. As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a full-scale operational machine, the . The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. The Baby had a 32-bit Word (computer architect ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microseconds
A microsecond is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one millionth (0.000001 or 10−6 or ) of a second. Its symbol is μs, sometimes simplified to us when Unicode is not available. A microsecond is to one second, as one second is to approximately 11.57 days. A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or of a millisecond. Because the next SI prefix is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10−5 and 10−4 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of microseconds. Examples * 1 microsecond (1 μs) – cycle time for frequency (1 MHz), the inverse unit. This corresponds to radio wavelength 300 m (AM medium wave band), as can be calculated by multiplying 1 μs by the speed of light (approximately ). * 1 microsecond – the length of time of a high-speed, commercial strobe light flash (see air-gap flash). * 1 microsecond – protein folding takes place on the order of microseconds (thus this is the speed of carbon-based life). * 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asynchronous Circuit
Asynchronous circuit (clockless or self-timed circuit) is a sequential logic, sequential digital logic electrical network, circuit that does not use a global clock circuit or clock signal, signal generator to synchronize its components. Instead, the components are driven by a handshaking circuit which indicates a completion of a set of instructions. Handshaking works by simple data transfer Communications protocol, protocols. Many synchronous circuits were developed in early 1950s as part of bigger asynchronous systems (e.g. ORDVAC). Asynchronous circuits and theory surrounding is a part of several steps in integrated circuit design, a field of digital electronics engineering. Asynchronous circuits are contrasted with synchronous circuits, in which changes to the signal values in the circuit are triggered by repetitive pulses called a clock signal. Most digital devices today use synchronous circuits. However asynchronous circuits have a potential to be much faster, have a lower ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Selectron Tube
The Selectron was an early form of digital computer memory developed by Jan A. Rajchman and his group at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) under the direction of Vladimir K. Zworykin. It was a vacuum tube that stored digital data as electrostatic charges using technology similar to the Williams tube storage device. The team was never able to produce a commercially viable form of Selectron before magnetic-core memory became almost universal. Development Development of Selectron started in 1946 at the behest of John von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Study, who was in the midst of designing the IAS machine and was looking for a new form of high-speed memory. RCA's original design concept had a capacity of 4096 bits, with a planned production of 200 by the end of 1946. They found the device to be much more difficult to build than expected, and they were still not available by the middle of 1948. As development dragged on, the IAS machine was forced to switch to Wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Processor Register
A processor register is a quickly accessible location available to a computer's processor. Registers usually consist of a small amount of fast storage, although some registers have specific hardware functions, and may be read-only or write-only. In computer architecture, registers are typically addressed by mechanisms other than main memory, but may in some cases be assigned a memory address e.g. DEC PDP-10, ICT 1900. Almost all computers, whether load/store architecture or not, load items of data from a larger memory into registers where they are used for arithmetic operations, bitwise operations, and other operations, and are manipulated or tested by machine instructions. Manipulated items are then often stored back to main memory, either by the same instruction or by a subsequent one. Modern processors use either static or dynamic random-access memory (RAM) as main memory, with the latter usually accessed via one or more cache levels. Processor registers are normal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Two's Complement
Two's complement is the most common method of representing signed (positive, negative, and zero) integers on computers, and more generally, fixed point binary values. Two's complement uses the binary digit with the ''greatest'' value as the ''sign'' to indicate whether the binary number is positive or negative; when the most significant bit is ''1'' the number is signed as negative and when the most significant bit is ''0'' the number is signed as positive. As a result, non-negative numbers are represented as themselves: 6 is 0110, zero is 0000, and −6 is 1010 (the result of applying the bitwise NOT operator to 6 and adding 1). However, while the number of binary bits is fixed throughout a computation it is otherwise arbitrary. Unlike the ones' complement scheme, the two's complement scheme has only one representation for zero. Furthermore, arithmetic implementations can be used on signed as well as unsigned integers and differ only in the integer overflow situations. Proce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word (computer Architecture)
In computing, a word is any processor design's natural unit of data. A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor. The number of bits or digits in a word (the ''word size'', ''word width'', or ''word length'') is an important characteristic of any specific processor design or computer architecture. The size of a word is reflected in many aspects of a computer's structure and operation; the majority of the registers in a processor are usually word-sized and the largest datum that can be transferred to and from the working memory in a single operation is a word in many (not all) architectures. The largest possible address size, used to designate a location in memory, is typically a hardware word (here, "hardware word" means the full-sized natural word of the processor, as opposed to any other definition used). Documentation for older computers with fixed word size commonly states memory sizes in words rather than bytes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
