103-631: Whitechapel Computer Works Ltd. ( WCW ) was a computer workstation company founded in the East End of London , United Kingdom in April 1983 by Timothy Eccles and Bob Newman, with a combined investment of £1 million from the Greater London Enterprise Board (£100,000 initially), venture capital companies Newmarket and Baillie Gifford , and the Department of Trade and Industry . The company
206-510: A binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at that time. The Z3 was not itself a universal computer but could be extended to be Turing complete . Zuse's next computer, the Z4 , became the world's first commercial computer; after initial delay due to the Second World War, it was completed in 1950 and delivered to
309-632: A central processing unit (CPU) in the form of a microprocessor , together with some type of computer memory , typically semiconductor memory chips. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logical operations, and a sequencing and control unit can change the order of operations in response to stored information . Peripheral devices include input devices ( keyboards , mice , joysticks , etc.), output devices ( monitors , printers , etc.), and input/output devices that perform both functions (e.g. touchscreens ). Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source, and they enable
412-419: A keyboard , and computed and printed the results, demonstrating the feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine. During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation . However, these were not programmable and generally lacked
515-466: A mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of specialized applications. At the University of Manchester , a team under the leadership of Tom Kilburn designed and built a machine using the newly developed transistors instead of valves. Their first transistorized computer and the first in the world, was operational by 1953 , and a second version was completed there in April 1955. However,
618-429: A monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip. Kilby's IC had external wire connections, which made it difficult to mass-produce. Noyce also came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year later than Kilby. Noyce's invention was the first true monolithic IC chip. His chip solved many practical problems that Kilby's had not. Produced at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was made of silicon , whereas Kilby's chip
721-501: A "generic port of UNIX System V". However, during 1985, Genix was replaced on the MG-1 by a port of 4.2BSD called 42nix and augmented with the Oriel graphical user interface to give a reported factor of six performance improvement in graphics performance, Oriel being partially kernel -based. The kernel-based screen driver in this architecture managed window viewports, called panels , and updated
824-471: A 1024 × 800 pixel monochrome display , a 10, 22 or 45 MB hard disk, 800 KB floppy drive, and an optional Ethernet interface, with prices stated as being equivalent to $ 6,975 for the 10 MB hard disk system, $ 8,250 for the 22 MB system and $ 9,500 for the 45 MB system. UK pricing was given as £5,495, £6,495 and £7,495 for the respective configurations. The product was claimed to be "the first $ 10,000 personal work station", comparable to
927-634: A 1998 retrospective, it was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project began at the university to develop it into a practically useful computer, the Manchester Mark 1 . The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1 , the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. Built by Ferranti , it
1030-506: A Chip (SoCs) are complete computers on a microchip (or chip) the size of a coin. They may or may not have integrated RAM and flash memory . If not integrated, the RAM is usually placed directly above (known as Package on package ) or below (on the opposite side of the circuit board ) the SoC, and the flash memory is usually placed right next to the SoC. This is done to improve data transfer speeds, as
1133-409: A creditor can enforce security against a company's assets in an effort to obtain repayment of the secured debt. It used to be the most popular method of enforcement by secured creditors , but recent legislative reform in many jurisdictions has reduced its significance considerably in certain countries. Administrative receivership differs from simple receivership in that an administrative receiver
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#17328584969961236-452: A kind of overlay, this being combined with the main display image to produce the final screen image. The machine also featured a "soft power switch" similar to that provided by the Apple Lisa (and also the slightly later Torch Triple X ) which initiated "an orderly UNIX shutdown". Realising that the price of the MG-1, at around £5,495, would need to be reflected in the physical appearance of
1339-403: A medieval European counting house , a checkered cloth would be placed on a table, and markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid to calculating sums of money. The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer , according to Derek J. de Solla Price . It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in
1442-520: A much more general design, an analytical engine , was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards , a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom . For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The engine would incorporate an arithmetic logic unit , control flow in
1545-524: A number of successes at breaking encrypted German military communications. The German encryption machine, Enigma , was first attacked with the help of the electro-mechanical bombes which were often run by women. To crack the more sophisticated German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine, used for high-level Army communications, Max Newman and his colleagues commissioned Flowers to build the Colossus . He spent eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building
1648-568: A receivership scheme for the administration, by the insurance commissioner, of insurance companies found to be insolvent as set forth in the NAIC's Insurer Receivership Model Act." Some organizations have come into existence on the state level to alter the proceedings. An example is the California Receivers Forum, which is a non-profit organization "formed by interested receivers, attorneys, accountants, and property managers, with support from
1751-404: A remedy of last resort in litigation involving the conduct of executive agencies that fail to comply with constitutional or statutory obligations to populations that rely on those agencies for their basic human rights . Receiverships can be broadly divided into two types: Receiverships relating to insolvency are subdivided into two further categories: administrative/equity receivership, where
1854-498: A scanner. However, the company entered receivership in April 1988. Its assets related to the Hitech-10 were purchased in June 1988 by a consortium, Computer Hitech International, which adopted the corporate identity Mistral Computer Systems . Mistral subcontracted the design of its systems to Algorithmics Ltd., this being "essentially the rump of the old Whitechapel design team". Algorithmics
1957-546: A sequence of sets of values. The whole machine was to be controlled by a read-only program, which was complete with provisions for conditional branching . He also introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic . In 1920, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the arithmometer , Torres presented in Paris the Electromechanical Arithmometer, which allowed a user to input arithmetic problems through
2060-406: A situation likely to remain common for some years. Enforcement is also a significant aspect of the situations where administrative receivership is still permitted; for example, the ability to take control of the entirety of the assets is important in structuring insolvency-remote special purpose companies that issue securities or operate infrastructure projects. In common law jurisdictions outside of
2163-460: A successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906. In his work Essays on Automatics published in 1914, Leonardo Torres Quevedo wrote a brief history of Babbage's efforts at constructing a mechanical Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. The paper contains a design of a machine capable to calculate formulas like a x ( y − z ) 2 {\displaystyle a^{x}(y-z)^{2}} , for
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#17328584969962266-402: A universal Turing machine. Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing its function required the re-wiring and re-structuring of the machine. With the proposal of the stored-program computer this changed. A stored-program computer includes by design an instruction set and can store in memory a set of instructions (a program ) that details the computation . The theoretical basis for
2369-440: A very powerful remedy, but it came to be considered unsatisfactory in that it was entirely a creature of the contract between the creditor and the borrower. There was no general ability on the part of the borrower or any other party to review the actions of the receiver (who would generally be acting on behalf of the borrower under the security document) or seek the supervision of the court. A general review of UK insolvency law in
2472-577: A wide range of tasks. The term computer system may refer to a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware , operating system , software , and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation; or to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster . A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems , including simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls , and factory devices like industrial robots . Computers are at
2575-411: Is an accountant with considerable experience of insolvency matters. The common law has long recognised the concept of a receiver. Following development of the floating charge , creditors were effectively able to take security over a company's entire business by means of a floating charge over the undertaking. Security documents generally contained very wide powers of appointment such that on default
2678-442: Is appointed over all of the assets and undertakings of the company. This means that an administrative receiver can normally only be appointed by the holder of a floating charge . Because of this unusual role, insolvency legislation usually grants wider powers to administrative receivers, but also controls the exercise of those powers to try to mitigate potential prejudice to unsecured creditors . Typically, an administrative receiver
2781-494: Is held by a receiver – a person "placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights" – especially in cases where a company cannot meet its financial obligations and is said to be insolvent . The receivership remedy is an equitable remedy that emerged in the English chancery courts , where receivers were appointed to protect real property. Receiverships are also
2884-463: Is the stored program , where all the instructions for computing are stored in memory. Von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper. Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation . Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, modern computers are said to be Turing-complete , which is to say, they have algorithm execution capability equivalent to
2987-581: The Enterprise Act 2002 . The administration regime was changed to make it more attractive, but also barred the right to appoint administrative receivers in any security created after 15 September 2003 (subject to certain specific exceptions). Any attempt to do so takes effect as a power to appoint an administrator. Administrative receivership still forms part of modern insolvency practice. Companies that get into financial difficulty today may well have security packages that were created before 15 September 2003,
3090-603: The Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera , between Kythera and Crete , and has been dated to approximately c. 100 BCE . Devices of comparable complexity to the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until the fourteenth century. Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in
3193-703: The CG-1 , was also announced in 1986, followed by the MG-200 , with an NS32332 processor, in March 1987. The MG-1 employed an 8 MHz 32016 CPU with 32082 memory management unit (MMU) and 32081 floating-point unit (FPU), with the MMU being noted in a 1985 article as "suffering from bugs" and being situated on its own board providing hardware fixes. In order to deliver the machine at prices closer to personal computers than contemporary workstations (such as Sun, Apollo and Perq), design techniques from
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3296-504: The E6B circular slide rule used for time and distance calculations on light aircraft. In the 1770s, Pierre Jaquet-Droz , a Swiss watchmaker , built a mechanical doll ( automaton ) that could write holding a quill pen. By switching the number and order of its internal wheels different letters, and hence different messages, could be produced. In effect, it could be mechanically "programmed" to read instructions. Along with two other complex machines,
3399-623: The ETH Zurich . The computer was manufactured by Zuse's own company, Zuse KG , which was founded in 1941 as the first company with the sole purpose of developing computers in Berlin. The Z4 served as the inspiration for the construction of the ERMETH , the first Swiss computer and one of the first in Europe. Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, at
3502-574: The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) for government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae , Freddie Mac , and the 11 Federal Home Loan Banks . Most individual states also have granted receivership authority to their own bank regulatory agencies and insurance regulators. State Insurance Departments are accredited by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC)—which states, "State law should set forth
3605-591: The HP 9000 series but more competitively priced, and was initially aimed at computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing applications. A contemporary evaluation of a 40 MB hard disk system with 2 MB RAM lists an approximate acquisition price of £9,000. While there was no distributor in the United States, the MG-1 was sold in North America by Cybertool Systems Ltd. from 1984 through 1986. A colour version,
3708-528: The Los Angeles Superior Court , to address the needs and concerns of receivers, to facilitate communication between the receivership community and the courts, and to assist in raising the level of professionalism of receivers..." The California Receivers Forum reports five local affiliates in the state: Bay Area, Central California, LA/Orange County, Sacramento Valley and San Diego. Court-appointed receivers are "the most powerful and independent of
3811-489: The microcomputer revolution in the 1970s. The speed, power, and versatility of computers have been increasing dramatically ever since then, with transistor counts increasing at a rapid pace ( Moore's law noted that counts doubled every two years), leading to the Digital Revolution during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Conventionally, a modern computer consists of at least one processing element , typically
3914-504: The "second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on
4017-513: The 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others developed mechanical differential analyzers. In the 1890s, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo began to develop a series of advanced analog machines that could solve real and complex roots of polynomials , which were published in 1901 by the Paris Academy of Sciences . Charles Babbage , an English mechanical engineer and polymath , originated
4120-829: The 1980s began with the Cork Report and culminated in the Insolvency Act 1986 . It put forward two major reforms. First, it put the receiver and manager on a statutory footing: a receiver appointed to all or substantially all of a company's property was now an administrative receiver and subject to some statutory responsibilities. Second, it introduced an " administration order " as an equivalent process to administrative receivership – but available to any company by court order independent of any particular security arrangement. The UK Parliament expected that companies and creditors would use administration in preference to administrative receivership. Crucially, however, Parliament had conceded in
4223-612: The Cambridge EDSAC of 1949, became operational in April 1951 and ran the world's first routine office computer job . The concept of a field-effect transistor was proposed by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain , while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs , built the first working transistor , the point-contact transistor , in 1947, which was followed by Shockley's bipolar junction transistor in 1948. From 1955 onwards, transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to
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4326-577: The EDVAC in 1945. The Manchester Baby was the world's first stored-program computer . It was built at the University of Manchester in England by Frederic C. Williams , Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill , and ran its first program on 21 June 1948. It was designed as a testbed for the Williams tube , the first random-access digital storage device. Although the computer was described as "small and primitive" by
4429-451: The ENIAC were six women, often known collectively as the "ENIAC girls". It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000 times a second, a thousand times faster than any other machine. It also had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was limited to 20 words (about 80 bytes). Built under
4532-490: The Insolvency Act that administrative receivership should have priority – that is, a secured creditor with a floating charge could defeat any attempt to commence an administration by appointing an administrative receiver. As a result, administration was not as popular as lawmakers had envisaged, and secured creditors habitually appointed administrative receivers to enforce security rights. Parliament took more drastic action in
4635-512: The London financial industry, and was aiming to increase production levels by relocating manufacturing from the UK to West Germany. The largest single user of the MG-1 was probably The City University (now City, University of London) which purchased and installed 140. Other academic users included Queen Mary College , the University of Lancaster , amongst "about a dozen" research institutes and universities in
4738-481: The MG-1 provided a monochrome display with a 1024 x 800 resolution, the CG-1 provided a 768 x 512 resolution supporting 256 colours from a palette of approximately 256,000 colours. Unlike the MG-1, the CG-1 employed a separate framebuffer fitted in an expansion slot to refresh the display, with screen data being copied to this framebuffer from the main system memory when updating the framebuffer contents. The MG-200 preserved
4841-425: The MG-1, Whitechapel engaged industrial designers Fether & Partners to produce a design for the different units of the system. The collaboration eventually settled on locating most of the electronics in a single "two-tier" box reminiscent of stacked hi-fi systems, with the monitor a separate unit that could be placed on top of the main unit or alongside. The main unit was also designed to be stood on its end. While
4944-524: The MOS transistor, was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960 and was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturized and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. With its high scalability , and much lower power consumption and higher density than bipolar junction transistors, the MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits . In addition to data processing, it also enabled
5047-450: The Scottish scientist Sir William Thomson in 1872 was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location. The differential analyser , a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration , used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform
5150-488: The U.S. Although the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus, it was much faster, more flexible, and it was Turing-complete. Like the Colossus, a "program" on the ENIAC was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored program electronic machines that came later. Once a program was written, it had to be mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. The programmers of
5253-589: The UK. Such plans were evidently never realised, with certain assets from Mistral being acquired by Amstral Workstation Solutions along with other businesses, with the resulting company, ABC Workstation Solutions, becoming a reseller of Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Sun products. Computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation ). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs . These programs enable computers to perform
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#17328584969965356-600: The UK. The MG-1 also found use as a silicon design workstation, equipped by European Silicon Structures to run that company's SOLO software suite, and by Lattice Logic to run that company's Chipsmith package. Whitechapel positioned the MG-series for publishing applications as the MG-Series Publishing Workstation based on the MG-1 and MG-200 models, bundling the PrintMaster technical publishing software along with
5459-578: The US, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942, the first "automatic electronic digital computer". This design was also all-electronic and used about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory. During World War II, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park achieved
5562-503: The United Kingdom, administrative receivership remains popular. A number of offshore jurisdictions market transaction structures to banks on the basis that they still retain the freedom to appoint administrative receivers in those jurisdictions. Because of their unique role, insolvency legislation usually confers wide powers on administrative receivers under applicable insolvency law, which is usually concurrent with powers granted under
5665-859: The advent of the integrated circuit (IC). The idea of the integrated circuit was first conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the Ministry of Defence , Geoffrey W.A. Dummer . Dummer presented the first public description of an integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. , on 7 May 1952. The first working ICs were invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor . Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning
5768-630: The basic concept which underlies all electronic digital computers. By 1938, the United States Navy had developed an electromechanical analog computer small enough to use aboard a submarine . This was the Torpedo Data Computer , which used trigonometry to solve the problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. During World War II similar devices were developed in other countries as well. Early digital computers were electromechanical ; electric switches drove mechanical relays to perform
5871-530: The best Arithmetician that euer [ sic ] breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number." This usage of the term referred to a human computer , a person who carried out calculations or computations . The word continued to have the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. During the latter part of this period, women were often hired as computers because they could be paid less than their male counterparts. By 1943, most human computers were women. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives
5974-563: The calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes . The Z2 , created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939 in Berlin , was one of the earliest examples of an electromechanical relay computer. In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3 , the world's first working electromechanical programmable , fully automatic digital computer. The Z3
6077-554: The concept of a programmable computer. Considered the " father of the computer ", he conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his difference engine he announced his invention in 1822, in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society , titled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables". He also designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that
6180-690: The core of general-purpose devices such as personal computers and mobile devices such as smartphones . Computers power the Internet , which links billions of computers and users. Early computers were meant to be used only for calculations. Simple manual instruments like the abacus have aided people in doing calculations since ancient times. Early in the Industrial Revolution , some mechanical devices were built to automate long, tedious tasks, such as guiding patterns for looms . More sophisticated electrical machines did specialized analog calculations in
6283-401: The creditor could take over the business immediately and without the input of any court. A receiver appointed to the entire business became known as a receiver and manager . The receiver and manager would typically have extensive powers over the business, including the power to sell it at a time and on terms that suited the appointing creditor. The ability to appoint a receiver and manager was
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#17328584969966386-493: The data signals do not have to travel long distances. Since ENIAC in 1945, computers have advanced enormously, with modern SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 865) being the size of a coin while also being hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than ENIAC, integrating billions of transistors, and consuming only a few watts of power. The first mobile computers were heavy and ran from mains power. The 50 lb (23 kg) IBM 5100
6489-507: The decision of the British Government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to political and financial difficulties as well as his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than anyone else could follow. Nevertheless, his son, Henry Babbage , completed a simplified version of the analytical engine's computing unit (the mill ) in 1888. He gave
6592-454: The direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full operation at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, using 200 kilowatts of electric power and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. The principle of
6695-441: The display using panel contents copied from raster images that were prepared in separate memory regions by applications. In order to improve responsiveness and reduce the latency observed with contemporary Unix systems, the mouse position was tracked using a dedicated processor which also monitored the keyboard for events, and a form of hardware mouse pointer was used, with the pointer bitmap being stored in its own 64-pixel buffer as
6798-673: The document(s) underlying his appointment" – i.e., a statute , financing agreement, or court order . The receiver may: Several regulatory entities have been granted power by the Congress to place banking and financial institutions into receivership like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for failing nationally chartered commercial banks ; the Office of Thrift Supervision for failing savings and loan associations (thrift institutions); and
6901-479: The doll is at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel , Switzerland , and still operates. In 1831–1835, mathematician and engineer Giovanni Plana devised a Perpetual Calendar machine , which through a system of pulleys and cylinders could predict the perpetual calendar for every year from 0 CE (that is, 1 BCE) to 4000 CE, keeping track of leap years and varying day length. The tide-predicting machine invented by
7004-475: The early 11th century. The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BCE and is often attributed to Hipparchus . A combination of the planisphere and dioptra , the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy . An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer and gear -wheels
7107-443: The early 2000s. These smartphones and tablets run on a variety of operating systems and recently became the dominant computing device on the market. These are powered by System on a Chip (SoCs), which are complete computers on a microchip the size of a coin. Computers can be classified in a number of different ways, including: Receivership In law , receivership is a situation in which an institution or enterprise
7210-399: The early 20th century. The first digital electronic calculating machines were developed during World War II , both electromechanical and using thermionic valves . The first semiconductor transistors in the late 1940s were followed by the silicon -based MOSFET (MOS transistor) and monolithic integrated circuit chip technologies in the late 1950s, leading to the microprocessor and
7313-473: The exact definition of the term "microprocessor", it is largely undisputed that the first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004 , designed and realized by Federico Faggin with his silicon-gate MOS IC technology, along with Ted Hoff , Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel . In the early 1970s, MOS IC technology enabled the integration of more than 10,000 transistors on a single chip. System on
7416-503: The first Colossus. After a functional test in December 1943, Colossus was shipped to Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 18 January 1944 and attacked its first message on 5 February. Colossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable computer. It used a large number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to perform a variety of boolean logical operations on its data, but it
7519-512: The first MIPS desktop computers in 1987", initially announced the MG-300 based on the MIPS architecture with a performance rating of 8 to 10 million instructions per second as part of a strategy to pursue sales in the US market via original equipment manufacturers and value-added resellers, with the company's management having been reconstituted to include "one-half new and one-half old staff". The MG-300 model
7622-725: The first attested use of computer in the 1640s, meaning 'one who calculates'; this is an "agent noun from compute (v.)". The Online Etymology Dictionary states that the use of the term to mean " 'calculating machine' (of any type) is from 1897." The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the "modern use" of the term, to mean 'programmable digital electronic computer' dates from "1945 under this name; [in a] theoretical [sense] from 1937, as Turing machine ". The name has remained, although modern computers are capable of many higher-level functions. Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers . The earliest counting device
7725-409: The form of conditional branching and loops , and integrated memory , making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete . The machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his machine had to be made by hand – this was a major problem for a device with thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was dissolved with
7828-462: The integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working integrated example on 12 September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as "a body of semiconductor material ... wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated". However, Kilby's invention was a hybrid integrated circuit (hybrid IC), rather than
7931-411: The integration. In 1876, Sir William Thomson had already discussed the possible construction of such calculators, but he had been stymied by the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators . In a differential analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to work. Starting in
8034-424: The judicially appointed managers." Unlike special masters and monitors, "the receiver completely displaces the defendants: the receiver makes large and small decisions, spends the organization's funds, and controls hiring and firing determinations." Examples of court-appointed receivers include: Administrative receivership is a procedure in the United Kingdom and certain other common law jurisdictions whereby
8137-569: The machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory , so it was not the first completely transistorized computer. That distinction goes to the Harwell CADET of 1955, built by the electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell . The metal–oxide–silicon field-effect transistor (MOSFET), also known as
8240-452: The modern computer was proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper, On Computable Numbers . Turing proposed a simple device that he called "Universal Computing machine" and that is now known as a universal Turing machine . He proved that such a machine is capable of computing anything that is computable by executing instructions (program) stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. The fundamental concept of Turing's design
8343-403: The more famous Sir William Thomson. The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer , built by H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MIT starting in 1927. This built on the mechanical integrators of James Thomson and the torque amplifiers invented by H. W. Nieman. A dozen of these devices were built before their obsolescence became obvious. By the 1950s,
8446-523: The personal computer industry were adopted, with a single eight-layer system board being used to hold the CPU and other integrated circuits. The 32201 timing and control unit (TCU) and 32202 interrupt control unit (ICU) were also employed by the MG-1. Initially, NatSemi's Genix operating system , described as being based on Unix System III with 4.1 BSD enhancements, or just 4.1BSD, was provided. NatSemi's Unix roadmap in 1984 advertised forthcoming 4.2BSD features and
8549-486: The practical use of MOS transistors as memory cell storage elements, leading to the development of MOS semiconductor memory , which replaced earlier magnetic-core memory in computers. The MOSFET led to the microcomputer revolution , and became the driving force behind the computer revolution . The MOSFET is the most widely used transistor in computers, and is the fundamental building block of digital electronics . The next great advance in computing power came with
8652-434: The receiver is granted wide management powers over all or most of the property of a business, and other receiverships (sometimes misleadingly called fixed charge receiverships ) where the receiver has limited control over specific property, with no broader powers beyond managing or selling the individual asset. Receivers are appointed by either a government regulator, privately, or a court. The receiver's powers "flow from
8755-488: The resolution of the MG-1 but introduced the faster NS32332 processor along with faster RAM which was dual-ported to give the processor and display direct access via a 64-bit data path. A colour CG-200 variant of the MG-200 was also available. WCW went into receivership in 1986, but were soon revived as Whitechapel Workstations Ltd. The new company, described as "a briefly flowering UK-based UNIX workstation company that shipped
8858-482: The results of operations to be saved and retrieved. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary , the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait : "I haue [ sic ] read the truest computer of Times, and
8961-526: The same time that digital calculation replaced analog. The engineer Tommy Flowers , working at the Post Office Research Station in London in the 1930s, began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange . Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation five years later, converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system, using thousands of vacuum tubes . In
9064-478: The stored-program computer was laid out by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory and began work on developing an electronic stored-program digital computer. His 1945 report "Proposed Electronic Calculator" was the first specification for such a device. John von Neumann at the University of Pennsylvania also circulated his First Draft of a Report on
9167-443: The success of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but analog computers remained in use during the 1950s in some specialized applications such as education ( slide rule ) and aircraft ( control systems ). Claude Shannon 's 1937 master's thesis laid the foundations of digital computing, with his insight of applying Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits being
9270-412: The versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers. The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine , invented by Sir William Thomson (later to become Lord Kelvin) in 1872. The differential analyser , a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson , the elder brother of
9373-406: Was a 16-transistor chip built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962. General Microelectronics later introduced the first commercial MOS IC in 1964, developed by Robert Norman. Following the development of the self-aligned gate (silicon-gate) MOS transistor by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs in 1967, the first silicon-gate MOS IC with self-aligned gates
9476-614: Was an early example. Later portables such as the Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable were considerably lighter but still needed to be plugged in. The first laptops, such as the Grid Compass , removed this requirement by incorporating batteries – and with the continued miniaturization of computing resources and advancements in portable battery life, portable computers grew in popularity in the 2000s. The same developments allowed manufacturers to integrate computing resources into cellular mobile phones by
9579-530: Was built with 2000 relays , implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz . Program code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating-point numbers . Rather than the harder-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage 's earlier design), using
9682-501: Was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951. At least seven of these later machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, one of them to Shell labs in Amsterdam . In October 1947 the directors of British catering company J. Lyons & Company decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of computers. Lyons's LEO I computer, modelled closely on
9785-443: Was developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968. The MOSFET has since become the most critical device component in modern ICs. The development of the MOS integrated circuit led to the invention of the microprocessor , and heralded an explosion in the commercial and personal use of computers. While the subject of exactly which device was the first microprocessor is contentious, partly due to lack of agreement on
9888-825: Was developed in the late 16th century and found application in gunnery, surveying and navigation. The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over it with a mechanical linkage. The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, by the English clergyman William Oughtred , shortly after the publication of the concept of the logarithm . It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development progressed, added scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, as well as transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions . Slide rules with special scales are still used for quick performance of routine calculations, such as
9991-449: Was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan , Persia in 1235. Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe, an early fixed- wired knowledge processing machine with a gear train and gear-wheels, c. 1000 AD . The sector , a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, trigonometry , multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as squares and cube roots,
10094-590: Was later acquired by MIPS Technologies in 2002. Mistral launched the Mistral-20 workstation in late 1989, based on a 25 MHz R3000 processor and running Unix SVR3 with BSD 4.3 extensions. Despite anticipating a product based on the R6000 , the company adjusted its plans to target the R4000 in its next product, also seeking to reduce its dependency on its existing German manufacturing partner and aiming to bring production back to
10197-477: Was made of germanium . Noyce's monolithic IC was fabricated using the planar process , developed by his colleague Jean Hoerni in early 1959. In turn, the planar process was based on Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick work on semiconductor surface passivation by silicon dioxide. Modern monolithic ICs are predominantly MOS ( metal–oxide–semiconductor ) integrated circuits, built from MOSFETs (MOS transistors). The earliest experimental MOS IC to be fabricated
10300-630: Was most likely a form of tally stick . Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented counts of items, likely livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay containers. The use of counting rods is one example. The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from devices used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BCE. Since then, many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented. In
10403-434: Was not Turing-complete. Nine Mk II Colossi were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total). Colossus Mark I contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Mark II with 2,400 valves, was both five times faster and simpler to operate than Mark I, greatly speeding the decoding process. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first electronic programmable computer built in
10506-839: Was situated in the Whitechapel Technology Centre—a council-funded high-technology enterprise hub—and began the design of their first workstation model in August 1983, shipping the first units by September 1984. The company's first workstation model was the MG-1 (named after the Milliard Gargantubrain from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ). The MG-1 was based on the National Semiconductor NS32016 microprocessor , with 512 KB of RAM (expandable to 8 MB),
10609-712: Was subsequently launched as the Hitech-10 , featuring the MIPS R2000 processor, this being followed by the Hitech-20 with a MIPS R3000 processor, subsequently known as the Mistral-20 . These ran the UMIPS variant of UNIX, with either X11 or NeWS -based GUIs, and were aimed at computer animation applications. Whitechapel had reportedly sold as many as 1,000 workstations from its first range, these having been "particularly successful" in
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