Info Tech. Part 1
ENIAC:
- ENIAC stands for Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer.
- ENIAC, was the first general purpose electronic computer.
- The ENIAC was big it was, 30 tons and took up 1800 square feet of floor space. The ENIAC contained 6000 manual switches.
- The ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory.
Vacuum Tube Sizes:
- In electronics, a vacuum tube is a device used to amplify, switch, otherwise modify, or create an electrical signal by controlling the movement of electrons in a low-pressure space.
- Some special function vacuum tubes are filled with low-pressure gas: these are so-called soft valves (or tubes), as distinct from the hard vacuum type which have the internal gas pressure reduced as far as possible
- Almost all depend on the thermal emission of electrons, hence thermionic.
- The first generation computers were huge, slow, expensive, and often undependable.
- In 1946 two Americans, Presper Eckert, and John Mauchly built the ENIAC electronic computer which used vacuum tubes instead of the mechanical switches of the Mark I.
- The ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes, which took up a lot of space and gave off a great deal of heat just like light bulbs do.
- The ENIAC led to other vacuum tube type computers like the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) and the UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer).
- The vacuum tube was an extremely important step in the advancement of computers.
- Vacuum tubes were invented the same time the light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison and worked very similar to light bulbs. Its purpose was to act like an amplifier and a switch.
Transistor:
- A transistor is a semiconductor device commonly used to amplify or switch electronic signals. - A transistor is made of a solid piece of a semiconductor material, with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit.
- A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor’s terminals changes the current flowing through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled power can be much larger than the controlling power, the transistor provides amplification of a signal.
- In 1947 three scientists, John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain working at AT&T’s Bell Labs invented what would replace the vacuum tube forever.
- This invention was the transistor which functions like a vacuum tube in that it can be used to relay and switch electronic signals.
- There were obvious differences between the transistor and the vacuum tube. The transistor was faster, more reliable, smaller, and much cheaper to build than a vacuum tube. One transistor replaced the equivalent of 40 vacuum tubes.
- They were also much smaller and gave off virtually no heat compared to vacuum tubes.
IC (Integrated Circuit):
- The integrated circuit was independently co-invented by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments[2] and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor [3] around the same time.
- Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958 and successfully demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958.[2]Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part of the invention of the integrated circuit.[4]
- Robert Noyce also came up with his own idea of integrated circuit, half a year later than Kilby
- Placing such large numbers of transistors on a single chip vastly increased the power of a single computer and lowered its cost considerably.
Timex Sinclair:
- The keyboard is a ‘touch sensitive membrane’, a flexible plastic surface with the actual switches under the surface.
- While easy to clean and water resistant, it is very difficult and slow to type on, because you have to press hard and very deliberately to use the tiny, closely-spaced keys. Touch-typing is impossible.
- Resourceful users hacked into their system and added their own ‘real’ keyboard, external to the system.
First Home Computer:
- In 1936, Zuse made a mechanical calculator called the Z1, the first binary computer.
- Zuse used it to explore several groundbreaking technologies in calculator development: floating-point arithmetic, high-capacity memory and modules or relays operating on the yes/no principle. Zuse’s ideas, not fully implemented in the Z1, succeeded more with each Z prototype.
Add comment September 23, 2008 aznhottie604
ICT Questions
1) What are some of the things that you would like to accomplish this school year?
- i would like to get better grades than my previous years like a b average. i would like to try in my studies and not get off task.
2) What types of technology are you interested in? Why?
- i am interested in any kind of technology like cameras, tvs, game consoles but mainly computers. Ever since i upgraded my computer it was really fun and exciting learning all these new technology that are in my home. Later i decided to build my sisters computer because it wasn’t like a chore but a hobby. Any soon later i would like to be like a computer technician/manufacturer or like electrical technician =)
3) What piece of technology could you not live without? Why?
- I would not be able to live a computer because i love computers. I can keep in touch in friends and like keep me entertained. I won’t be able to do my homework more efficient than ever.
4) What would you like to learn about this year in this course?
- i would like to learn more about technology because something i love to do is being graded on and something i enjoy doing.
Add comment September 8, 2008 aznhottie604
Definitions
Hard Drive: A hard disk drive (HDD), commonly referred to as a hard drive, hard disk, or fixed disk drive,is a non – voltatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces.
CPU (central proccessing unit): is a description of a class of logic machines that can execute computer programs.
Motherboard: A motherboard is the central or primary printed circuit board(PCB) making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer.
Power Supply: A device or system that supplies eletrical or other types of energy to an output load or group of loads is called a power supply unit or PSU.
PCI: Peripheral Component Interconnect, or PCI Standard (commonly PCI), specifies a computer bus for attaching peripheral devices to a computer motherboard.
PCI-Express: (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) a computer expansion card interface format introduced by Intel in 2004. PCI Express was designed to replace the general-purpose PCI expansion bus, the high-end PCI-X bus and the AGP graphics card interface.
USB (universal serial bus): a serial bus standard to interface devices to a host computer. USB was designed to allow many peripherals to be connected using a single standardized interface socket and to improve the plug-and-play capabilities by allowing hot swapping, that is, by allowing devices to be connected and disconnected without rebooting the computer or turning off the device.
Firewire: is Apple Inc.’s name for the IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus
IEEE 1394: a serial bus interface standard for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer, frequently used in a personal computer (and digital audio and digital video).
LCD: A liquid crystal display (LCD) is an electro-optical amplitude modulator realized as a thin, flat display device made up of any number of color or monochrome pixels arrayed in front of a light source or reflector.
Plasma: plasma display panel (PDP) is a type of flat panel display now commonly used for large TV displays (typically above 37-inch or 940 mm). Many tiny cells located between two panels of glass hold an inert mixture of noble gases (neon and xenon). The gas in the cells is electrically turned into a plasma which then excites phosphors to emit light.
HDMI: High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a compact audio/video connector interface for transmitting uncompressed digital streams.
RAM: Random Access Memory a type of computer memory that can be accessed randomly; that is, any byte of memory can be accessed without touching the preceding bytes. Ram is the most common type of memory found in computers and other devices.
Flash Memory: non-volatile computer memory that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. It is a technology that is primarily used in memory cards and USB Flash Drives for general storage and transfer of data between computers and other digital products.
AGP: Accelerated Graphics Port is a high-speed point-to-point channel for attaching a graphics card to a computer’s motherboad, primarily to assist in the acceleration of 3D computer graphics.
DVD: Digital Versatile Disc” or “Digital Video Disc” is a popular optical disk storagemedia format. Its main uses are videoand data storage. Most DVDs are of the same dimensions as compact discs (CDs) but store more than six times as much data.
Add comment September 8, 2008 aznhottie604
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