Chapter 2 Flashcards
First device to be called a supercomputer and its year
Cray 1 , 1976
First electronic product by IBM and it’s year? Also name its successor along with the year
701, 1952
704, 1954
What was the internal nickname for “IBM 701” ?
Defence Calculator
Some important features about the IBM 701
- First electronic product by IBM
- Could be rented for $15000
- Tape driver was more efficient and used an ingenious vacuum-column system
- Faster memory reads because it read all bits of word at once
Give some applications of the “Defence Calculator” `
Weapons Design, Trajectory prediction, Elections, Payroll, Financial analysis, cryptanalysis, logistics for the military
What were the changes incorporated in the IBM 704 (1954)?
- No more Williams tube -> Core memory (non volatile) meaning data stored even without power and multiple plains allowed simultaneous writing and reading of bits
- Support for floating point arithmetic
- Three point registers to simply programming
- Interrupts(instead of checking for input and output repeatedly) were also integrated inspired form Univac 1103 (NASA). Later called “SPOOLing”.
Name the founders of ERA ,its full form and year it was founded. Also what is it famous for?
Howard Engstrom & William Norris
Engineering Research Associates (1946)
Famous for the drum memory
What was Task 13?
A Task assigned to the ERA to build a programmable electronic computer around the drum memory, code named “Atlas”.
An example of a drum based computer
G-15, designed by Harry Huskey and built by Bendix (1956).
Who wrote the first compiler? Give it’s two names. Give also the names of its successors and their year
Grace Hopper
Two names: Automatic programming and A0 (1952)
A1 and A2 in 1953
Who wrote Fortran?
John Backus, released by IBM for 704 in early 1957
What was SHARE and how was IBM involved with it?
A formal user group of IBM 704, which developed an impressive library of routines that each user could use to:
- Share code or documents
- Report bugs
IBM provided administrative and programming support to SHARE.
When was FORTRAN Monitoring System released and what did it do?
1959 by SHARE and it loaded the monitor triggered code to load the next program without waiting for human operator to react.
Name the first piece of software to be called an “Operating System” and which device was it built for? Did it have any other name? What were some of it’s features?
SOS (SHARE Operating System) or Share 709 project, 1956.
Features:
- Batch control
- powerful assembler
- output buffering
What was the issue with SOS 1956?
Slow and used Assembly. People wanted FORTRAN now. Then SHARE developed IBSYS to run FORTRAN (later became IBM’s Job Control Language)
A Fortran compiler developed by the University of Waterloo, its year and was useful for what?
Watfor , 1965
Useful for students to debug and increase execution speed.
What was the Eispack project?
Project for calculation of matrix eigenvalues , release by Argonne National Laboratory in 1973. Its sequel was “Linpack for Linear algebra”.
What was BLAS?
Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms to have machine specific code which would allow routines to run effectively on different architectures.
When and where was Algol introduced? What structure did it use and where was that structure later used?
1958 in Zurich at a gathering for computer scientists. Improved version launched in 1960. It introduced block structure later used in C, Java, Pascal. It also supported recursion.
What is the full form and use of BNF?
Backus Normal Form, used to describe the grammar of computer language
What was Dijktra’s role in Algol?
He generalised the stack data structure into a fundamental feature of computer hardware and software and was also one of the people to build the compiler for Algol 60.
Transistors were developed by? What were its features?
Bell Laboratories. It was smaller, faster, more efficient , initially more expensive.
_____ was pioneered by Philco a company in Philadelphia, performed well and could be made in quantity.
Surface barrier transistor
Which devices mark the beginning of the transistor era?
SOLO: first transistorised computer to operate in US
Commercial version was Transact S-1000 then S-2000 in 1958.
Small computer by Univac: Solid State 80
