Evolution of the Major Programming Languages

Page 1

Zuse's Plankalkül

Plankalkül was the first high level programming language that was developed in 1945 and published in 1972, but was never implemented.

1936-1945: German scientist Konrad Zuse built complex and sophisticated mechanical computing machines

1941-1945: He wrote the world's first chess-playing program in Plankalkül

1945: WWII bombing forced Zuse to go into hiding, he rescued one of his machine, the Z4, and began writing an algorithmic language for this computer. Due to this forced isolation, his findings were hindered in reaching public popularity.

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ENIAC

ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945.

Supported by the US military, it was often considered to be the first modern computer.

Containing 17,468 vacuum tubes, each tube is a signal for on/off switch, thereby making the system a 17,468 bit computer.

Today, these bulbs are replaced by registers.

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ARPAnet

1964: Cold war era

Old system: A user would have to schedule a time on the company computer to do a specific task.

New system: With ARPAnet, companies can perform multiple tasks at the same time on a single machine.

Advantages: increase workflow on a single machine. If one system goes down, other computers connected to the network can continue performing the down system's work.

Disadvantages: relied on packet-switching network, making it unreliable and expensive: Calls could easily be dropped and circuits are monopolized, making it expensive.

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IBM 704 and Fortran

1940s-1950s: Interpretative systems were slow because of the lack of floating-point hardware.

Floating-point operations were time-consuming and needed to be stimulated in software = a lot of overhead.