Evolution of Computing Tools
計算工具的演化
Sai-Ping Li 李世炳
Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica
December 17, 2005
Stonehenge, which lies 13km north of Salisbury, England, is believed to
have been an ancient form of calendar designed to capture the light from
the summer solstice in a specific fashion.
Pebbles were used by the ancients for a variety of purposes. They are
one of the earliest methods of counting using a physical aide.
最早期的計算方法，以數小石頭來幫助計算。
The abacus is one of the earliest devices to be used in calculation, and
still in use, in various forms, around the world today.
算盤 --- 最古老的計算工具之一
Counting Board and Abacus
計數板與算盤
The history of the abacus probably traced back to ancient Mesopotamia.
The people probably drew lines on the ground and used pebbles to
represent numbers and do calculations.
The counting board is a piece of wood, stone or metal with carved
grooves or painted lines between which beads, pebbles or metal discs
were moved. The abacus is a device, usually of wood (plastic, in recent
times), having a frame that holds rods with freely-sliding beads
mounted on them.
The person operating the abacus performs calculations in their head and
uses the abacus as a physical aid to keep track of the sums, etc.
Evolutionary Time-line:
This time-line shows the evolution from the earliest counting board
to the present day abacus. The evolution of the abacus can be divided
into three ages: Ancient Times, Middle Ages, and Modern Times.
算盤演化過程可分為三個時期：
遠古年代，中世紀年代，新世代。
Ancient Times 遠古年代
The Salamis Tablet, the Roman Calculi and Hand-abacus
are from the period c. 300 B.C to c. 500 A.D.
The Salamis Tablet
The oldest surviving counting
board is the Salamis tablet
(originally thought to be a
gaming board), used by the
Babylonians circa 300 B.C.,
discovered in 1846 on the
island of Salamis.
Counting Board--Pebbles were used for counting
Middle Ages 中世紀年代
The Apices, the coin-board and the Line-board are
from the period c. 5 A.D. to c. 1400 A.D.
Modern Times 新世代
The Suan-pan, the Soroban and the Schoty are
from the period c. 1200 A.D to the present.
John Napier, (1550-1617), in early 1600s took animal bones
and carved the multiples of the Gelosia method of arithmetic
on them; by adding on the diagonal, one could "multiply"
Napier’s
Bones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier's_bones
Schickard's Calculating clock(1623)-The machine incorporates a set of
"Napier's bones" (on the cylinders)
and a mechanism to add the partial
products (with a carry mechanism).
Four-Figure Tables
對數表
In 1614, John Napier discovered the
logarithm which made it possible to
perform multiplications and
divisions by addition and
subtraction.
Slide Rule 計算尺
1. In 1614, John Napier discovered the logarithm which made it
possible to perform multiplications and divisions by addition
and subtraction.
2. In 1620, Edmund Gunter soon reduced the effort by drawing a
number line in which the positions of numbers were
proportional to their logs.
3. It was invented in 1625 by William Oughtred.
John
Napier
William
Oughtred
Straight Slide Rule
Circular Slide Rule
A slide rule consists of three interlocking calibrated strips.
The central strip can be moved lengthways relative to the
other two. A sliding cursor with an alignment line can
record an intermediate result on any of the scales.
Division—
For example, the division of 22 by 2.75.
A Slide Rule is –
An ANALOG computer
Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Hans Bethe Dies
Giant of 20th Century Physics Dies
Nobel Prize Winner Hans Bethe Helped Design
Atomic Bomb, Studied Stars
By Ben Dobbin
The Associated Press
Monday, March 7, 2005; 12:56 PM
“At his zenith, there seemed to be few well-defined
conundrums of the cosmos that Bethe couldn't master. He
could not program the simplest computer, but had no
trouble digesting reams of supercomputer readouts. For
help, he reached into his briefcase for a slide rule he had
carried around for 70 years.”
Von Neumann, Fermi and Feynman
It is said that during the Manhattan Project
to develop the atomic bomb, whenever an
impromptu numerical result was needed, Dick
Feynman would pound out the result on
mechanical calculator, Fermi (?) would work it
out on a slide rule, and von Neumann would
work it out in his head... all three usually
arriving at about the same result at about the
same time
(1791 – 1871)
Pascal's Pascaline (1642)
Stepped Drums (1672 Leibniz)
(First mechanical
calculator, 1822)
(1886)
Mechanical Calculators
Computer Age
The first computers were people! "Computer"
was originally a job title: it was used to describe
those human beings (predominantly women) whose
job it was to perform the repetitive calculations
required to compute such things as navigational
tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for
astronomical almanacs.
ENIAC: the "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator"
Completed in 1946, he first vacuum tube-based computer, has 18,000
vacuum tubes and takes up 1,800 square feet of space. Considered to be
the first "true computer"
Computer
Punch
Cards
An IBM Key Punch machine which operates like a typewriter except
it produces punched cards rather than a printed sheet of paper
Paper Tape
A typical
paper tape
reader
Computer Bug =
Computer
+
Bug
In 1945, Grace Hopper found the first computer "bug": a dead moth
that had gotten into the Mark I and whose wings were blocking the
reading of the holes in the paper tape. The word "bug" had been used
to describe a defect since at least 1889 but Hopper is credited with
coining the word "debugging" to describe the work to eliminate
program faults.
The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe computer
The original IBM Personal Computer (PC)
Development of Computers
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1936--Turing Machine (Alan Turing)
1943--Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
1946--ENIAC
1947--Transistor (Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain)
1957--Transistorized Experimental Computer (TX-O)
1958--Integrated circuit (Jack St. Claire Kilby)
1971--Intel's first microprocessor, the 4004, was developed
1971--The first microcomputers (PCs) were developed
1974--Apple I
1981--IBM PC
1988--Laptops
1994--DNA Computing; Quantum Computing
Moore's Law (1965, Gordon Moore)
Number of transistors/square inch on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months.
Development of Computer Languages
• 1854--British mathematician George Boole devises binary algebra.
• 1936--Turing Machine (Alan Turing)
•
•
•
•
•
1958--Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL)
1958--List Processor (LISP)
1958--ALGOL
1963--Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC)
1967--Formula Translation (FORTRAN)
• 1971--PASCAL
• 1972--C (ALGOL-60)
• 1979--Ada
• 1983—C++
Development of Operating Systems
•1969--UNIX
•1978--APPLE
•1981--MS-DOS
•1985—Microsoft WINDOWS
•1991—LINUX (Linus Torvalds)
(Tim Berners-Lee,1989)
Next Computing Tool---Worldwide Grid
LCG Service Hierarchy 服務架構
Tier-0 – the accelerator centre
• Data acquisition & initial processing
• Long-term data curation
• Distribution of data  Tier-1 centres
Canada – Triumf (Vancouver)
France – IN2P3 (Lyon)
Germany – Forschunszentrum Karlsruhe
Italy – CNAF (Bologna)
Netherlands – NIKHEF/SARA (Amsterdam)
Nordic countries – distributed Tier-1
Tier-1 – “online” to the data acquisition
process
 high availability
• Major computing centres
– high level of service quality
• Managed Mass Storage
 grid-enabled data service
Spain – PIC (Barcelona)
Taiwan – Academia SInica (Taipei)
• Data-heavy analysis
UK – CLRC (Oxford)
US – FermiLab (Illinois)
• National, regional support
– Brookhaven (NY)
• Academia Sinica Grid Centre
Tier-2 – ~100 centres in ~40 countries
• Simulation
• End-user analysis – batch and interactive
Global Science needs a Global Grid
全球科學需要一個全球網格
• LCG depends on two major science grid infrastructures –
LCG 依賴兩個主要的科學網格基本架構
EGEE and the US Open Science Grid
What Next?