Project 1: Conduct a brief literature search on the Internet about John Van Neum
ID: 3772168 • Letter: P
Question
Project 1:
Conduct a brief literature search on the Internet about John Van Neumann, who is the Father of Computer Science.
In paragraph format, summarize and describe his contribution to the development of first generation computers.
three pages in length
Include a list of references at the end of your paper. You must incorporate at least 5 references.
Please refer to the outline provided in the attachment for the formatting style of your paper.
please follow the above form. Do not copy and paste from google.
Explanation / Answer
Answer :
John Van Neumann is father of computer science.His contribution towards the development of first generation computers is very vast and he undertaken a study of computation that demonstrated that a computer could have a simple and fixed structure and able to execute any kind of calculation given properly programmed control without the need for hardware changes.Von Neumann was interested in presenting a logical definition of the stored program computer rather than an engineering definition .He also discovered a understanding of how practical fast computers should be organized and built became fundamental studying for future generations of high-speed digital computers and were universally accepted.The computer system consists of four main parts:Central Arithmetical unit,This is to carry out the four basic arithmetic operations and perhaps higher arithmetical functions such as roots, logarithms, trigonometric functions etc.Central Control unit This is to control the proper sequencing of operations and make the individual units act together to carry the task programmed into the system.Memory and the Input/Output devices The Memory was to store both numerical data and numerically coded instructions. And the IO unit were to serve as the UI into the computer.
The first step was the provision of a special type of machine instruction called conditional control transfer which permits the program sequence to be interrupted and reinitiated at any point and by storing all instruction programs together with data in the same memory unit so that, when desired instructions could be arithmetically modified in the same way as data.The result of these techniques and several others, computing became more flexible, and more efficient, with the instructions in subroutines performing far more computational work. Mostly used subroutines did not have to be programmed for each new problem but could be kept intact in librabry files and read into memory when needed. so that much of a given program could be assembled from the subroutine library. The computer control served as an task runner for the overall process. The advantages of these techniques became clear, the techniques became standard practice. The first generation of modern programmed electronic computers to take advantage of these improvements.
Van Neumann was concerned with the overall structure of a computing system the abstract parts that are compatable and the functions of each part, and how the parts interact to process the information. The specific materials of the implementation of the parts was not relavent to his analysis. Any technology that meets the functional specifications can be used with no effect on his results.
The computers also includes using random access memory which is a memory designed to give almost constant access to any particular piece of information. These machines had punched-card input and output devices and RAM of small memory of words,some were about the size of a grand piano and required small electron tubes required by the earlier machines.
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