EECS 1520 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ada Lovelace, Herman Hollerith

• School: York University
• Department: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Course: EECS 1520
• Professor: Lew Lowther

Document Summary

Chapter 1- the big picture: computing systems. Computing systems are dynamic entities used to solve problems and interact with their environment. Hardware - the physical elements of a computing system (printer, circuit boards, wires, keyboard ). Software - the programs that provide the instructions for a computer to execute. Data - information in a form a computer can use: layers of a computing system: Communication application operating system programming hardware . *(this is a recurrent topic in the course: early history of computing. Abacus (2400bc)- an early device to record numeric values. Blaise pascal (1623-1662)- created a mechanical device to add and subtract. Gottfried wilhelm von leibniz (1646-1716)- created a mechanical device to perform all 4 whole number operations. Augusta ada byron (lovelace)- babbage"s assistant, considered to be the first. Herman hollerith (1860-1929) electro-mechanical tabulator: first generation hardware (1951-1959) Vacuum tubes- large, not very reliable, generated a lot of heat. Magnetic drum- memory device that rotated under a read/write head.