Outline for March 28, 2007

1. Greetings and felicitations!
2. Introduction to the class
   1. Rules of the road
   2. Lab exercises
   3. Term paper
3. Key ideas of computing
   1. Base 2 arithmetic
   2. Stored information can be a program or data
4. Computing in the ancient world
   1. Abacuses, cords
5. Computing in the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment
   1. Oughtred's slide rule
   2. Pascal's calculator
   3. Babbage's Difference Engine
6. Modern computing
   1. Punch cards and electronic tabulating
   2. World War II and Colossus
   3. ENIAC and Mark 1
   4. UNIVAC
   5. Mainframes: IBM 360, CDC 6400
   6. Minicomputers: DEC PDP-8, PDP-11, VAX
   7. Supercomputers: CRAY-1, Connection Machine
   8. Workstations: Xerox Alto, Star; Sun Microsystems computers
   9. Personal computers: Apple's Lisa, Macintosh; IBM PC
7. Coming of the Internet
   1. First telephone connection from Bell Labs to Dartmouth College
   2. Department of Defense funds development of ARPANET, which becomes operational in 1969