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Latest Revision:
Sept 15, 2006
)
Week Three Notes
Announcements
- The E-mail assignment is due today - BEFORE midnight, today.
- We are doing 'self-service' roll call today. Please mark the appropriate
box with an 'X'. Please tell me if your name is missing from the sheet.
- I posted grades on the E-mail assignment
- We will go over formatting ideas for the Glossary assignment wednesday.
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Chapter Zero -- Basics
- Most people in the world have never touched a computer. How far will
computers 'reach' in the future?
- What are the parts of a computer? What is disk storage? What is primary
memory? What does the CPU do? (Look at Silberschatz slide 1.10.)
- What is an operating system?
- What is an application?
- What is a 'document'?
- How are we going to do our backups?
- File compression - important for conserving storage space and
transmission time.
- How, basically, does the WWW and HTML work?
- Talk about how web-crawlers and search engines work.
- Do an example of a Yahoo index search
- Talk about spam and spam filters
- What do you think of Simson Garfinkel's idea that "a substantial number
of people, young and old alike, will never go online. We need to figure
out how we will avoid making life unbearable for them."
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Chapter One -- Computer Currents and Internet Waves
- "Computers are everywhere."
- Babbage - Difference Engine - Analyical Engine (Programmable) - First Programmer:
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace
- Early Computers:
- 1939 - Konrad Zuse - programmable, general purpose
- 1943 - Turing et al - Colossus - electronic, digital special-purpose
code-breaker
- 1939 - John Atanasoff - Atanassoff-Berry Computer -
original purpose: differential equation solver
- 1944 - Howard Aiken - Mark I - general purpose - electromechanical
relays
- 1945 - ENIAC - John Mauchly & J. Presper Eckert - original purpose:
calculation of projectile trajectories - electronic & digital -
18,000 vacuum tubes.
- 1951 - Univac - Mauchly & Eckert - Remington Rand - first general
purpose commercial computer
- 1971 - Invention of the micro processor - a computer on a chip - paves
the way for cheap computers - PC's and computers embedded in devices like
cars, microwave ovens, etc.
- Gordon Moore's Law - 1965 - the number of transistors on a chip will
double about every two years. This prediction has proved to be quite
close to the truth over the last 40 years.
- Kinds of Computers:
- Mainframes - maybe the size of a refrigerator - costing a million
dollars - machines like this can control an ATM network or an
airline reservation system - timesharing allows such computers to
service many users concurrently.
- Super Computers - for work even more demanding than a mainframe can
handle - weather prediction, simulation of nuclear reactor dynamics,
computer animation - typically super computers are massively
parallel - thousands of microprocessors.
- Servers - powerful computers used to service clients over a network
- examples include web and file service.
- Workstations - designed for use by one person, but usually more
powerful than a personal computer - for example a computer for a
programmer, scientist, animator or designer.
- PC's - personal computers - "Wintels", Macs
- Portables - laptops
- Handheld computers - Personal Digital Assistants - PDA's
- Embedded computers - 90% of all computers - in watches, toys, game
machines, stereo's, digital video recorders, ovens, and so on. They
typically run a computer "etched" in firmware - e.g. ROM.
- Networking of computers in the 90's made them extremely important as
communication devices.
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