List of of the famous computers

List of of the famous computer

A-list computing

1. ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first large scale, electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems, although earlier computers had been built with some of these properties. ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the USA Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. The contract was signed on June 5, 1943 and Project PX was constructed by Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering from July, 1943. Unveiled February 14th, 1946 in University of Pennsylvania, costing $500,000. ENIAC was shut down on November 9th, 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29 of that year, it was turned on and would be in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.

2. Deep Blue was the first machine to win in chess against a world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. This first win occurred on February 10th, 96, and Deep Blue - Kasparov, 96, Game 1 is a famous chess game. However, Kasparov won 3 games and drew 2 of the following games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2. The match concluded on February 17, 1996. The project started as "ChipTest" at Carnegie Mellon University by Feng-hsiung Hsu; the computer system produced was named Deep Thought after the fictional computer of the same name from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Hsu joined IBM in 1989 and worked with Murray Campbell on parallel computing problems. Deep Blue was developed out of this. The name is a play on Deep Thought and Big Blue, IBM's nickname.

3. The Colossus machines were early computing devices used by British codebreakers to read encrypted German messages during World War II. Colossus was an early electronic digital computer. Colossus was designed by engineer Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill. The prototype, Colossus Mark I, was operational at Bletchley Park in February 1944. An improved Colossus Mark II was first installed in June 1944, and ten Colossi had been constructed by the end of the war.

4. The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second generation massively parallel supercomputer architecture, launched in 95. Like the previous Cray T3D It was a fully distributed memory machine using a 3D torus topology interconnection network. The T3E initially used the DEC Alpha 21164 microprocessor and was designed to scale from 8 to 2176 Processing Elements (PEs). Each PE had between 64 MB and 2 GB of DRAM and a 6-way interconnect router with a payload bandwidth of 480 MB/s in each direction. Unlike many other MPP systems, including the T3D, the T3E was fully self-hosted and ran the UNICOS/mk distributed operating system with a GigaRing I/O subsystem integrated into the torus for network, disk and tape I/O.

difference engine

Charles Babbage (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was a mathematician, analytical philosopher, mechanical engineer and (proto-) computer scientist who originated an idea of a programmable computer. He began in 1822 with what he called the difference engine, made to compute values of polynomial functions.

Unlike similar efforts of the time, Babbage's difference engine was created to calculate a series of values automatically. By using the method of finite differences, it was possible to avoid the need for multiplication and division. The first difference engine needed around 25,000 parts of a combined weight of fifteen tons standing eight feet high. Although he received much funding for the project, he did not complete it. He later designed an improved version, "Difference Engine No. 2". This was not constructed at the time, but was built using his plans in 1989-1991, to 19th century tolerances, and performed its first calculation at the London Science Museum bringing back results to 31 digits, far more than the average modern pocket calculator.

Cray-1

Cray left CDC in 1972 to form a company, Cray Research, with research and development facilities in Chippewa Falls but with the business headquarters back in Minneapolis.
The Cray-1 was a major success when it was released, faster than all computers at the time except for the ILLIAC IV. The first system was sold within a month for US$8.8 million.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was the first electronic digital computing device. The machine, conceived in 1937, was capable of solving up to 29 simultaneous linear equations and was successfully tested, though its input/output mechanism was still unreliable in 42 when its inventors left Iowa State College for World War II assignments. The ABC pioneered important elements of modern computing, including binary arithmetic and electronic switching elements, but its special-purpose nature and lack of a changeable, stored program distinguish it from modern computers.

The IBM ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator), called the Mark I by Harvard University[1], was the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the USA. It is considered by some to be the first universal calculator. The electromechanical ASCC was devised by Howard H. Aiken, created at IBM, shipped to Harvard in February 1944, and formally delivered there on August 7, 1944.

The Manchester Mark I was one of the earliest electronic computers, built at the University of Manchester in England, in 1949. Also called Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM. It was developed from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) or "Baby". It is especially historically significant due to its pioneering inclusion of a kind of index registers in its architecture, as well as being the platform on which Autocode was developed, one of the first "high-level" computer languages. The Manchester Mark I was one of the earliest electronic computers, built at the University of Manchester in England, in 1949. It was also called Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM. It was developed from the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) or "Baby". It is especially historically significant due to its pioneering inclusion of a kind of index registers in its architecture, as well as being the platform on which Autocode was developed, one of the first "high-level" computer languages.

The VP2000 were the second series of vector processor supercomputers from Fujitsu. They replaced their earlier Fujitsu VP series machines starting in 1990, and sold for a short period before being replaced by various massively parallel machines. The VP2000 was similar in many ways to their earlier designs, and in turn to the Cray-1, using a register-based vector processor for performance. For additional performance the vector units supported a special multiply-and-add instruction that could retire two results per clock cycle. This instruction "chain" is particularly common in many supercomputer applications, allowing the VP2000 to outperform the Cray-1 at a similar clock speed.

ASCI Blue Mountain is a supercomputer that is installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The computer was a collaboration between Silicon Graphics Corporation and Los Alamos Lab. It was installed in 1999. It is a ccNUMA cluster of SMP SGI Origin 2000 systems. It contains 6,144 MIPS R10000 microprocessors. Its theoretical top performance is 2.5 teraflops. It was built as a stage of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) started by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to build a simulator to replace live WMD testing following the moratorium on testing started by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and extended by Bill Clinton in 1993. It was unveiled (commissioned) in 1998.

Konrad Zuse's Z3 was the first working programmable, fully automatic machine, attributes, with the addition of conditional branching, have often been the ones used as criteria in defining a computer. The Z3 was built with 2,200 relays, had a clock frequency of ~5–10 Hz, and a word length of 22 bits. Calculations on the computer were performed in full binary floating point arithmetic. The machine was completed in 1941 (on May 12 that year, it was successfully presented to an audience of scientists in Berlin). The original Z3 was destroyed in 1944 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin. A fully functioning replica was built in the 1960s by the originator's company Zuse KG and is on permanent display in the Deutsches Museum. In 1998 the Z3 was proven to be Turing-complete.

CSIRAC (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer), originally known as CSIR Mk I, was Australia's first digital computer, and the fifth stored program computer in the world and presently the oldest intact (albeit inoperable) digital computer in the world. The CSIRAC was constructed by a team led by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard, working in large part independently of similar efforts across Europe and the US , and ran its first test program some time in November 1949.

The term "Super Computing" was first used by New York World newspaper in 1929 to refer to a large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University.

1961 IBM 7030 "Stretch" 1.2 MFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first attempt at building a supercomputer. The first 7030 was delivered to Los Alamos in 1961. Originally priced at $13.5 million, its failure to meet its aggressive performance estimates forced the price to be dropped to only $7.78 million and its withdrawal from sales to customers beyond those having already negotiated contracts. Even though the 7030 was much slower than expected, the 7030 was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until 1964.

The Earth Simulator (ES) was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. The system was developed for NASDA, JAERI, and JAMSTEC in 1997 for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming. It has been able to run holistic simulations of global climate in both the atmosphere and the oceans down to a precision of 10 km. Located at the Earth Simulator Center (ESC) in Kanazawa-ku (ward), Yokohama-shi, Japan, the computer is capable of 35.86 trillion (35,860,000,000,000) floating point calculations per second, or 35.86 TFLOPS.

Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several next-generation supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the petaflops range, and currently reaching speeds over 280 teraflops (sustained). It is a cooperative project among IBM, particularly the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy (which is partially funding the project) and academia. There are five Blue Gene projects in development, among them Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/C, and Blue Gene/P. On September 29, 2004, IBM announced that a Blue Gene/L prototype at IBM Rochester (Minnesota), led by Drew Flaada, had overtaken NEC's Earth Simulator as the fastest computer in the world, with a speed of 36.01 TFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark, beating Earth Simulator's 35.86 TFLOPS. This was achieved with an 8-cabinet system, with each cabinet holding 1,024 compute nodes. Upon doubling this configuration, the machine reached a speed of 70.72 TFLOPS by November.

Altair platform. The computer system that Gates and Allen built their first computer software for in 1975.

The Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. The company founded on April 1, 1976 by Jobs, Wozniak and Wayne (and later incorporated January 3, 1977 without Wayne, who had sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak) to sell the Apple I personal computer kit at US$666.66. Apple Computer was founded on 2066

The Turbo PC the debut PC of Dell. in 1985.

ERA 1103, regarded as the first successful scientific computer. The debut computer worked on by Seymour Cray. ERA eventually became part of UNIVAC, and started to be phased out. Seymour Cray began working in the computing field in 1950 when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA)

Some famous fictional computing

Skynet is the fictional computer network created by Cyberdyne Systems Corporation for Strategic Air Command-North American Aerospace Defense Command featured in the terminator movies.

HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) character in the Space Odyssey series, the first being the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1968. HAL is an artificial intelligence, the sentient on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery that eventually runs rampant. HAL is usually represented only as his television camera "eyes" that can be seen throughout the Discovery spaceship. The voice of HAL 9000 was performed by Canadian actor Douglas Rain. HAL became operational on January 12, 1997 (1992 in the movie) [1] at HAL Communications Corp. in Urbana, Illinois, and was created by Dr. Chandra. In the 2001 film, HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition, facial recognition, and natural language processing, but also lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting emotions, expressing emotions and reasoning.

Nomad is an early robotic interstellar probe launched from Earth in 2002 on a mission to search for new life-forms. Nomad was created by the brilliant Earth scientist

Master Control Program (Tron) The MCP began life as a chess program. main villain of the Disney movie Tron. It is an artificial intelligence created by Ed Dilinger (also played by Warner) that ruled over the world inside ENCOM's mainframe computer. During the rule of the MCP, many programs were enslaved and forced to play games against its henchmen, led by Sark.

Data is a character in the Star Trek fictional universe. A Soong-type android, Lieutenant Commander Data served as the second officer and chief operations officer aboard the starships USS Enterprise-D and the USS Enterprise-E. Data appeared throughout the Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) television series and in later movies. Data is portrayed by actor Brent Spiner.

The Borg or Borg Collective is a race of cyborgs in the Star Trek fictional universe. They are known both within and beyond Star Trek fandom for their relentless pursuit of what they want to assimilate, their rapid adaptability to almost any defense, and their ability to continue functioning after what may seem a devastating or even fatal blow seemingly unaffected

In the Star Trek fictional universe, the Emergency Command Hologram or ECH is an extension of the USS Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram, known as The Doctor. It is intended to support or replace command personnel aboard the ship in case of an emergency.

Matrix The computer system in the famous movie that houses a virtual reality life for many.

Deep Thought a computer created by a pan dimensional, hyper intelligent race of beings to come up with the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. When, after seven and a half million years of calculation, the answer finally turns out to be 42, Deep Thought's creators sheepishly realize that they do not know the question. Deep Thought itself does not know the ultimate question to Life, the Universe and Everything, but offers to design an even more powerful computer (Earth; see Earth in fiction) to calculate it. After ten million years of calculation, the Earth is destroyed by Vogons five minutes before the computation is complete.

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