Computers in The Future

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. -- Popular Mechanics, March 1949

J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania built the world’s first fully operational electronic general-purpose computer. This machine, called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), was funded by the U.S. Army and became operational during World War II, but it was not publicly disclosed until 1946. ENIAC was used for computing artillery firing tables. The machine was enormous - 100 feet long, 8½ feet high, and several feet wide. Each of the 20 ten-digit registers was 2 feet long. In total, there were 18,000 vacuum tubes.

Although the size was three orders of magnitude bigger than the size of the average machines built today, it was more than five orders of magnitude slower,with an add taking 200 microseconds. The ENIAC provided conditional jumps and was programmable, which clearly distinguished it from earlier calculators. Programming was done manually by plugging up cables and setting switches and required from a half hour to a whole day. Data were provided on punched cards. The ENIAC was limited primarily by a small amount of storage and tedious programming.

In 1944, John von Neumann was attracted to the ENIAC project. The group wanted to improve the way programs were entered and discussed storing programs as numbers; von Neumann helped crystallize the ideas and wrote a memo proposing a stored-program computer called EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). Herman Goldstine distributed the memo and put von Neumann's name on it, much to the dismay of Eckert and Mauchly, whose names were omitted. This memo has served as the basis for the commonly used term von Neumann computer. Several early inventors in the computer field believe that this term gives too much credit to von Neumann, who conceptualized and wrote up the ideas, and too little to the engineers, Eckert and Mauchly, who worked on the machines. Like most historians, your authors (winners of the 2000 IEEE von Neumann Medal) believe that all three individuals played a key role in developing the stored-program computer. Von Neumann's role in writing up the ideas, in generalizing them, and in thinking about the programming aspects was critical in transferring the ideas to a wider audience.

In the earliest days of computing, designers set performance goals - ENIAC was to be 1000 times faster than the Harvard Mark-I, and the IBM Stretch (7030) was to be 100 times faster than the fastest machine in existence... 激情燃烧的年代……

The first general-purpose pipelined processor is considered to be Stretch, the IBM 7030. Stretch followed the IBM 704 and had a goal of being 100 times faster than the 704. The goal was a stretch from the state of the art at that time, hence the nickname.The plan was to obtain a factor of 1.6 from overlapping fetch, decode, and execute, using a four-stage pipeline. Bloch [1959] and Bucholtz [1962] described the design and engineering trade-offs, including the use of ALU bypasses.

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