Chapter 394 Computers (1)

The "first computer" was born at different times according to various sources, most of which agree that the world's first computer was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), born in the United States in 1946.

In fact, there is no standard answer to this question, and ENIAC is just one of them. Historically, people have long attempted to create machines capable of automatic calculation, and after many years of development, computers have evolved into what they are today. Many types of computers can be considered the "first computer," depending on how one defines a "computer."

If anything that can help us do arithmetic can be called a computer, then the ancient abacus should also be considered a computer, although it is entirely manual.

Between the 17th and 20th centuries, a number of non-electric computers appeared, which contained no circuit boards but a series of mechanical gears instead.

In the 17th century, France had a "universal genius" named Pascal, who was a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, fluid dynamicist, and one of the founders of probability theory. Pascal created a box filled with gears that would turn when wound up. However, this "first mechanical computer" could only perform simple addition and subtraction, roughly equivalent to the level of a kindergarten child.

Later, the German mathematician Leibniz created a mechanical computer capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, reaching the level of an elementary school student. The difference engine created by the British mathematician Babbage in the 1820s could calculate some mathematical functions. Although Babbage dreamed of creating a more comprehensive second-generation difference engine, he never succeeded.

Later, people realized that if calculations were only performed using mechanical gears, the computing power would be extremely limited. To give computers more powerful computing capabilities, a new approach was needed. Thus, electronic computers were born. Relying on electricity for operation is much faster than relying on gears, so electronic computers have stronger computing capabilities. During World War II, the flight trajectories of airplanes and shells on the battlefield required a lot of complex calculations, which gave electronic computers an opportunity to shine. For example, the world's first large-scale automatic digital computer, "Mark I," could store 72 sets of data, each with 23 decimal places. It took 300 milliseconds for an addition, 6 seconds for a multiplication, and 15.3 seconds for a division. Although this speed seems slow now, it represented a historic breakthrough in computing technology, helping people complete a large number of calculation tasks.

So, who is the inventor of the electronic computer? There are several answers to this question. In 1936, the British mathematician Turing first proposed a computer concept that produced output through the interaction of programs and input data, which was later named the Universal Turing Machine. In 1938, the first computer that worked with relays, "Z-1," appeared, but relays have a mechanical structure and are not entirely electronic devices. In 1942, Atanasoff and Berry invented the first computer using vacuum tubes, named ABC after the initials of their names. However, the ABC could only solve systems of linear equations and could not do other work. Under Turing's guidance, the first computer capable of writing programs to perform different tasks, "Colossus," was born in the UK in 1943 for codebreaking.

The universally recognized first modern electronic computer in human history is the ENIAC, born in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. Although it was born later than the machines mentioned earlier, it had the main structure and functions of today's computers, was a general-purpose computer, and was the first computer equivalent to the Universal Turing Machine.

It was a colossal machine, consisting of 17,468 vacuum tubes, 60,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 6,000 switches; it occupied 170 square meters, weighed 30 tons, had a power consumption of about 150 kilowatts, and could perform 5,000 operations per second, which seems trivial now but was groundbreaking at the time. The ENIAC, which used vacuum tubes as components, was thus called a vacuum tube computer and represented the first generation of computers. Vacuum tube computers had large, power-consuming, and heat-generating tubes, so they could not operate for very long.

Fortunately, today's Germany has a technological advantage, and transistor technology has gradually matured and begun to be applied in many devices. Therefore, the first computer in this timeline is an electronic product mainly based on transistors, with vacuum tubes as a secondary component.

From the 1950s in the original timeline, transistors gradually replaced vacuum tubes and eventually led to the mass production of integrated circuits and microprocessors.

Initially, transistors and transistorized devices were not popular because they were too expensive. However, the U.S. military was very interested because military equipment has special requirements for portability, reliability, and durability. For most of the 1950s, it was the support of the military that allowed the young transistor industry to survive.

In 1957, the Soviet satellite "Sputnik" was launched, officially starting the U.S.-Soviet space race. In 1961, U.S. President Kennedy announced the goal of "sending a man to the moon before the end of 1970." Compared to the Soviet Union, the U.S. was slightly behind in rocket technology, so reducing weight was even more necessary, and all electronic equipment was made with transistors as much as possible. The semiconductor industry, based on transistors, thus made rapid progress. Integrated circuits became the main focus of this period.

Interestingly, during the same period, Soviet military electronic equipment took a completely different path, remaining fond of vacuum tubes for a long time. Continuing the World War II approach of simplicity, maturity, and reliability in weapons development, the Soviets believed that vacuum tube technology was mature and capable of producing high-power components, so they focused mainly on miniaturizing vacuum tubes. In the choice between analog and digital circuits, Soviet experts also believed that analog circuits were more mature and better suited to the working characteristics of vacuum tubes, so they vigorously developed analog circuits centered around operational amplifiers.

Khrushchev once stated that "vacuum electronic tubes have better survivability under nuclear electromagnetic pulses than transistors, so the Soviet Union should not work on transistors but focus on the miniaturization of electronic tubes." Due to policy reasons, the Soviet semiconductor industry was always behind the West, and the quality of the transistors produced was not up to standard, ultimately creating a vicious cycle and increasing dependence on vacuum tubes.

By the mid-1970s, Soviet engineers finally realized that the road to vacuum tube miniaturization had come to an end; if they tried to reduce the size of vacuum tubes by another order of magnitude, the cost would be astronomical. Meanwhile, Western countries had developed integrated circuits that could integrate 140,000 transistors on a 0.5 square centimeter silicon chip. It took the Soviet Union ten years to prove that vacuum tube miniaturization could not compare with transistor integrated circuits. Entering the 1980s, the Soviet electronic industry began to catch up, and before its dissolution, it was able to produce medium-scale integrated circuits, approaching the level of the West in the early 1980s.