CS 2110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Harvard Mark I, Ieee Floating Point, Grace Hopper
Document Summary
~ * ~ ** ~ contextual historical stuff ~ ** ~ * ~ 72 adding machines with 23 decimal digits. Grace hopper was the 2nd programmer on the 1st computer (the harvard mark i) Control unit instructions & memory. Not a relay computer, a vacuum computer. Had an insight that changed computing forever: Von neumann model: program and data both stored as sequences of bits in the computer"s memory, the program is executed under the direction of the control unit. 1000 44 bit words in 128 acoustic delay lines. Acoustic delay line: a big circular queue of bits using sound waves/compression waves in mercury to keep track of data. Probably not allowed to do that today. Flops = floating point operations per second. Ibm blue gene/l (2004-2008) 60t - 475t flops. Parallelism -- a bunch of power processors, gpu"s are doing stuff on the side. All based on von neumann style of computing.
