Project 1 -- Computing System History
You must publish your project to your website, and e-mail its URL to
Prof. Feldman and your
lab instructor, before 11 A.M., Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005
This file is available online at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~41/fall05/41f05p1.html
In this project, you will do some research using the World Wide Web.
Use a search engine like www.google.com
to start locating materials.
The project
To understand where we are, and where we are going, it is essential to
know something about where we came from. This project will immerse you
in some computing history. Here are your tasks:
- Discover three computer systems--one commercially marketed
mainframe,
one
commercially marketed minicomputer, and one consumer-oriented
"microcomputer".
The choice of computers is up to you; however, all three computers
must
have been in fairly common use in the 1960s and 1970s, and in any case
before 1981, the year in which the IBM PC was introduced. Do
not
use any information from the course textbook!
- Use Mozilla Composer or Netscape Composer (no other
process
will be accepted!) to write
a report with three sections. Each section will describe one of the
three
computers in 300-500 words; the complete report will thus be about
1000-1500
words.
- For each computer, identify the computer and its manufacturer,
and try
to supply these facts:
- year the computer was first introduced
- physical size of the unit containing the CPU and main memory
(core
memory
or RAM)
- range of main memory (core memory or RAM) supported
- varieties and capacities of input/output devices
- approximate price for a usable system
- any other interesting facts you wish to add
- For each computer, you must cite your sources by
including the
link(s)
to the website(s) you used for that computer.
- When you are finished, publish the page to your SEAS website.
Browse to
the published page to make sure it got there OK. Test all the links in
it! Do NOT put a link to it in your index page; just e-mail the URL to
your lab instructor. (After everyone has done this project, we'll ask
you
to link it in to your index page.)
Classwide collaboration
This course is not a contest or a competition. We're going to
experiment
with letting everyone help everyone with their research. When you find
an interesting website "out there", you are strongly encouraged
to send a note to the class
mailing list, giving the URL you found.
Note: We hope everyone will share URLs, but your report-writing
work
must be your own!
