Lesson Notes By Weeks and Term - Senior Secondary School 1

SUBJECT: ICT

CLASS:  SS 1

DATE:

TERM: 1st TERM

 
WEEK SEVEN

TOPIC: COMPUTING DEVICES II (20th Century to Date)

Reference book: Hiit @ School, Computer Studies for Senior Secondary Education.

CONTENT

Computing devices from the 20th century to date includes: 

ENIAC

The title of ‘forefather’ of today’s all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which means Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the “computers”, meaning the women who were employed to calculate the firing tables for the army’s artillery guns. ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. It employed paper card readers obtained from IBM. When operating, the ENIAC was silent, each of the 18,000 vacuum tubes generated waste heat like a light bulb and all this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only be operated in a specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning system. ENIAC is commonly accepted as the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer and was used from 1946 to 1955.  ENIAC was used mainly for engineering calculations, Ballistic tables, Atomic energy calculation, Random number studies and weather forecasting.

EDVAC 

Eckert and Mauchly next teamed up with the mathematician John Von Neumann to design EDVAC short for Electronic Discreet Variable Automatic Computer, which pioneered the stored program. Because he was the first to publish a description of this new computer, von Neumann is wrongly credited with the realization that the sequence of computation steps could be represented electronically just as the data was. But this major breakthrough was found in Eckert’s notes long before he ever started working with von Neumann. EDVAC was to be a vast improvement upon ENIAC.  Mauchly and Eckert started working on it.  Their idea of this device was to have programs stored inside the computer and also for EDVAC to have more internal memory.

EVALUATION

Give the full meaning of the following:

    (a)    ENIAC

    (b)    EDVAC

READING ASSIGNMENT: HiiT @ School, Computer Studies for Senior Secondary Education. Chapter Two, page 10.

WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT

OBJECTIVE

1. The first electronic digital machine was ____ a) Abacus   (b) ENIAC   (c) EDVAC
2. ENIAC used _____ vacuum tubes. a) 18,000 b) 18,800 c) 81,800
3. How many people teamed up to make EDVAC? a) 3 b) 2 c) 4 

4.___ is commonly accepted as the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer. 

1. a) UNIVAC (b) ENIAC   (c) EDVAC
2. The following are the professors who built ENIAC except a) John Mauchly b) J. Presper  

    Eckert c) John Von Neumann

THEORY

1. Write the full meaning of the following: a) ENIAC b) EDVAC
2. Write short note on the following:         i) EDVAC           ii) ENIAC