Capítulo 1 - Breve Histórico sobre Computação
É um programa que atua como interface entre um usuário de computador e o hardware deste computador.
Principal propósito de um SO é propiciar um ambiente no qual o usuário possa executar os seus programas.
2 objetivos principais a serem alcançados por um SO:
a) tornar o computador conveniente ao usuário;
b) usar o hardware de maneira eficiente
Para entender os SO de hoje, veremos como os componentes de um SO evoluiram como soluções naturais para problemas existentes nos primeiros estágios da computação.
Um sistema de computação pode ser dividido em 4 partes:
· hardware (cpu, memória, I/O devices);
· sistema operacional;
· aplicativos (compiladores, sistema de banco de dados, videogames, programas comerciais);
· usuários (pessoas, máquinas ou outros computadores)
Na Inglaterra Babbage, um matemático com grande capacidade de efetuar cálculos, começou a se destacar apontando diversos erros em cálculos de órbitas de planetas feitas para a Coroa Britânica. Como uma forma de resolver o problema de erros e da demora em efetuar tais cálculos ele imaginou uma máquina composta de engrenagens mecânicas que pudesse fazê-los de forma automática. Conseguiu recursos financeiros da Coroa Britânica, porém nunca concluiu seu projeto por inteiro.
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The Grandfather of Modern Digital Computing
The Charles Babbage Memorial Fund honors Charles Babbage, the English inventor and mathematician who, in the 1800's, believed he could build a computing machine. He convinced the British government to finance his project, then billed the government for more and more. Many years later -- and many British pounds later -- he still hadn't finished his machine. So he dropped the idea and -- can you believe this? -- tried to build an even fancier machine. He didn't finish that one either. You might say his life was a failure that was expensive for the British government!
But Charles Babbage is admired by computerists (in spite of his face, which was even sterner than Beethoven's), because he was the first person to realize that a computing machine must be composed of an input device (he used a card reader inspired by Jacquard's punched cards for looms), a memory (which he called The Store), a central processing unit (which he called The Mill), and an output device (he used a printer). He also made provision for early results to modify later calculations.
Charles Babbage is, indeed, the grandfather of the digital computer.
Reference: The Secret Guide to Computers by Russ Walter (phone: 617-666-2666).
Although the analytical engine astonishingly anticipated the computer, a significant difference is that it was decimal, not binary. Since Babbage's machine was not electronic, he did not think in binary terms. The use of wheels and gears meant that his system was not "purely" digital, in the modern sense.
Source: Norman T. Gridgeman
Babbage's efforts to realize "operations research" led to "first lass mail." Babbage went against the "commmon sense" of his times: he demonstrated the cost of collecting and stamping a letter for different sums according to the distance it traveled cost more in time, labor, and money than a fixed price stamp.
Babbage calculated the first reliable mortality tables, now a mainstay of the insurance industry.
Babbage worked out the first speedometer.
Babbage invented the locomotive "cow-catcher."
Babbage built a device to study the retina of the eye, but Helmholtz's invention four years later was credited as the original opthalmoscope.
Babbage's efforts to construct a computing machine piqued the interest of Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron. He depleted his own funds, government grants, and the resources of Lady Lovelace. Together they risked her remaining inheritance on a bet based on their system for winning horse races. They failed. Apparantly, "winning at the track is far more difficult than designing a computer."
Source: Isaac Asimov
Babbage undertook to develop a mechanically precise means to make mathematical calculations. The British government supported his efforts to eliminate costly computational errors in navigational charts -- which put lives and cargo in danger -- and prevent accounting mistakes that caused overpayment to pensioners.
Babbage's "difference and analytical engines" were based on the rule of finite differences for solving complex equations without multiplying or dividing, but by repeated addition. In 1991 the National Museum of Science and Technology in London built a working machine using Babbages's plans and parts available to him at that time. Weighing hundreds of pounds and operated with a hand crank, it has never generated an incorrect answer.
One part of an engine built by Babbage's son in 1879 from his father's plans and unassembled parts was auctioned recently for almost $300,000. The successful bidder was the Power House Museum in Australia. Bill Gates was rumored to be an anonymous telephone bidder.
The module was accompanied by instructions judged only slightly less incomprehensible than modern computer documentation, to whit: "Put all the axes so that the little crossbars are all parallel to each other and to the front of the machine."
Richard Stevenson wrote for the NY Times: "While there is no direct line of descent from Babbage's device to the modern computer, the Difference Engine was a tremendous step forward for its time and a harbinger of how technology could be applied to tasks that had previously been the exclusive province of the mind." But it was computerlike and came to be regarded as a "thinking machine" because turning a crank converted physical energy into a solution without knowledge of the mechanism.
Reference: NY Times (October 9, 1995).
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Babbage.html
Born December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK, Died 1871, London; Known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical machine. His previous Difference Engine was a special purpose device intended for the production of tables.
While he did produce prototypes of portions of the Difference Engine, it was left to Georg and Edvard Schuetz to construct the first working devices to the same design which were successful in limited applications.
Significant Events in His Life: 1791: Born; 1810: Entered Trinity College, Cambridge; 1814: graduated Peterhouse; 1817 received MA from Cambridge; 1820: founded the Analytical Society with Herschel and Peacock; 1823: started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government; 1827: published a table of logarithms from 1 to 108000; 1828: appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (never presented a lecture); 1831: founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science; 1832: published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery"; 1833: began work on the Analytical Engine; 1834: founded the Statistical Society of London; 1864: published Passages from the Life of a Philosopher; 1871: Died.
Other inventions:
The cowcatcher, dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking, but abhorred street musicians.
BABBAGE OBSERVED
[1]
Near the northern pole of the moon there is a crater named for Charles Babbage. When he died in 1871, however, few people knew who he was. Only one carriage (the Duchess of Somerset's) followed in the burial procession that took his remains to Kensal Green Cemetery. The Royal Society printed no obituary, and the Times ridiculed him. The parts of the Difference Engine that had seemed possible of completion in 1830 gathered dust in the Museum of King's College.
In 1878 The Cayley committee told the government not to bother constructing Babbage's Analytical Engine. By the 1880's Babbage was known primarily for his reform of mathematics at Cambridge. In 1899 the magazine Temple Bar reported that "the present generation appears to have forgotten Babbage and his calculating machine". In 1908, after being preserved for 37 years in alcohol, Babbage's brain was dissected by Sir Victor Horsley of the Royal Society. Horsley had to remind the society that Babbage had been a "very profound thinker".
Charles Babbage was born in Devonshire in 1791. Like John von Neumann, he was the son of a banker - Benjamin (Old Five Percent) Babbage. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving his MA in 1817. As the inventor of the first universal digital computer, he can indeed be considered a profound thinker. The use of Jacquard punch cards, of chains and subassemblies, and ultimately the logical structure of the modern computer - all come from Babbage.
Popularly, Babbage is a sort of Abner Doubleday of data processing, a colorful fellow whose portrait hangs in the anteroom but whose actual import is slight. He is thought about, if at all, as a funny sort of distracted character with dirty collar. But Babbage was much more than that. He was an amazing intelligence.
THE PHILOSOPHER
Babbage was an aesthete, but not a typical Victorian one. He found beauty in things: in stamped buttons, stomach pumps, railways and tunnels, in man's mastery over nature.
A social man, he was obliged to attend the theater. While others dozed at Mozart, Babbage grew restless. "Somewhat fatigued with the opera [Don Juan]", he writes in the autobiographical Passages From the Life of a Philosopher, "I went behind the scenes to look at the mechanism". There, a workman offered to show him around. Deserted when his Cicerone answered a cue, he met two actors dressed at "devils with long forked tails". The devils were to convey Juan, via trapdoor and stage elevator, to hell.
In his box at the German Opera some time later (again not watching the stage), Babbage noticed "in the cloister scene at midnight" that his companion's white bonnet had a pink tint. He thought about "producing colored lights for theatrical representation". In order to have something on which to shine his experimental lights, Babbage devised "Alethes and Iris", a ballet in which 60 damsels in white were to dance. In the final scene, a series of dioramas were to represent Alethes' travels. One diorama would show animals "whose remains are contained in each successive layer of the earth. In the lower portions, symptoms of increasing heat show themselves until the centre is reached, which contains a liquid transparent sea, consisting of some fluid at white heat, which, however, is filled up with little infinitesimal eels, all of one sort, wriggling eternally".
Two fire engines stood ready for the "experiment of the dance", as Babbage termed the rehearsal. Dancers "danced and attitudinized" while he shone colored lights on them. But the theater manager feared fire, and the ballet was never publicly staged.
Babbage enjoyed fire. He once was baked in an oven at 265oF for "five or six minutes without any great discomfort", and on another occasion was lowered into Mt. Vesuvius to view molten lava. Did he ponder Hell? He had considered becoming a cleric, but this was not an unusual choice for the affluent graduate with little interest in business or law. In 1837 he published his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, to reconcile his scientific beliefs with Christian dogma. Babbage argued that miracles were not, as Hume write, violations of laws of nature, but could exist in a mechanistic world. As Babbage could program long series on his calculating machines, God could program similar irregularities in nature.
Babbage investigated biblical miracles. "In the course of his analysis", wrote B. V. Bowden in Faster than Thought (Pitman, London, 1971), "he made the assumption that the chance of a man rising from the dead is one in 10^12". Miracles are not, as he wrote in Passages From the Life of a Philosopher, "the breach of established laws, but... indicate the existence of far higher laws".
THE POLITICIAN
Of all his roles, Babbage was least successful at this one. He had himself to blame: he was too impatient, too severe with criticism, too crotchety. Bowden wrote that, in later life, Babbage "was frequently and almost notoriously incoherent when he spoke in public". What ultimately kept him from building an Analytical Engine was not his inability to finish a project, but his inadequacies as a political man, as a persuader. His vision was not matched by his judgment, patience, or sympathy.
Babbage was a confusing political figure. A liberal republican, he was pro-aristocratic and strongly antisocialist. Friend to Dickens and to the workman, he was a crony to the Midlands industrialist. The son of a Tory banker, he supported the cooperative movement and was twice an unsuccessful Whig candidate to Parliament. But his liberalism waned during the 1840's; by 1865, he was a conservative utilitarian for whom capitalism and democracy were incompatible.
In July of 1822, two days after Shelley drowned near La Spezia, Babbage wrote a letter to the president of the Royal Society, describing his plan for calculating and printing mathematical tables by machine. By June of 1823 Babbage met with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who granted money and told Babbage to proceed with the engine (which he did, starting work in July). But no minutes were made of this initial meeting.
In August 1827, Babbage's 35-year-old wife, Georgiana, died. Babbage traveled to the Continent. By the end of 1828 he returned to England, the initial £1,500 grant gone. Babbage was financing the construction himself. And the exchequer could not recall promising further funds.
Convincing the government to continue with two tons of brass, hand-fitted steel and pewter clockwork was not easy. In 1829 a group of Babbage's friends solicited the attention of the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister. Wellington went to see a model of the engine, and in December ordered a grant of £3,000. Engineer Joseph Clement was hired to construct the engine for the government, and to oversee the fabrication of special tools.
By the end of 1830 Babbage wanted to move the engine's workshop to his house on Dorset Street. A fireproof shop was built where Babbage's stables had stood. A man of great ego, Clement refused to move from his own workshop, and made, according to Babbage, "inordinately extravagant demands". Babbage would not advance Clement further money, so Clement dismissed his crew, and work on the Difference Engine ceased.
This did not seem to perturb Babbage. His initial scheme for the Difference Engine called for six decimal places and a second-order difference; now he began planning for 20 decimal places and a sixth-order difference. "His ambitious to build immediately the largest Difference Engine that could ever be needed", wrote Bowden, "probably delayed the exploitation of his own ideas for a century".
With Clement and his tools gone, Babbage wanted to meet with Prime Minister Lord Melbourne in 1834 to tell him of a new machine he had conceived - the Analytical Engine, an improved device capable of any mathematical operation. He contended it would cost more to finish the original engine than to construct this new one. But the government did not wish to fund a new engine until the old one was complete. "He was ill-judged enough", wrote the Reverend Richard Sheepshanks, a secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, "to press the consideration of this new machine upon the members of Government, who were already sick of the old one". (Sheepshanks was Babbage's archenemy. In 1854 he published a vituperative 100-page work, "Letter to the Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Royal Observatory, in Reply to the Calumnies of Mr.Babbage" at its meeting in June 1853, and in his book entitled The Exposition of 1851.)
For the next eight years, Babbage continued to apply to the government for a decision on whether to continue the suspended Difference Engine or begin the Analytical Engine, seemingly unaware of the social problems that preoccupied Britain's leaders during what Macauley called the Hungry Forties. Although £17,000 of public money had been spent, and a similar amount by Babbage, the Prime Minister avoided him. "It is nonsense", wrote Sheepshanks, "to talk of consulting a Prime Minister about the kind of Calculating Machine that he wants". Prime Minister Robert Peel recommended that Babbage's machine be set to calculate the time at which it would be of use. "I would like a little previous consideration", wrote Peel, "before I move in a thin house of country gentlemen a large vote for the creation of a wooden man to calculate tables from the formula x^2 + x + 41".
Finally, in November of 1842, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, having sought the opinion of Sir George Airy on the utility of the machine, and having been told it was "worthless", said he and Peel regretted the necessity of abandoning the project. On the 11th of November, Babbage finally met with Peel, and was told the bad news.
By 1851 Babbage had "given up all expectation of constructing the Analytic Engine", even though he was to try once more with Disraeli the next year. He wrote in the vitriolic Exposition of 1851: "Thus bad names are coined by worse men to destroy honest people, as the madness of innocent dogs arises from the cry of insanity raised by their villainous pursuers".
Some believed Babbage had "been rewarded for his time and labor by grants from the public use", according to biographer Moseley Maboth (Irascible Genius, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1964). "We got nothing for our £17,000 but Mr. Babbage's grumblings", wrote Sheepshanks in his "Letter to the Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Royal Observatory". "We should at least have had a clever toy for our money".
Peel, however, declared in Parliament that Babbage "had derived no emolument whatsoever from the government". Offered a baronetcy in recognition of his work, Babbage refused, demanding a life peerage instead. It was never granted.
THE MUSIC HATER
Lady Lovelace wrote that Babbage hated music. He tolerated its more exquisite forms, but abhorred it as practiced on the street. "Those whose minds are entirely unoccupied", he wrote with some seriousness in Observations of Street Nuisances in 1864, "receive [street music] with satisfaction, as filling up the vacuum of time". He calculated that 25% of his working power had been destroyed by street nuisances, many of them intentional. Letters to the Times and the eventual enforcement of "Babbage's Act", which would squelch street nuisances, made him the target of ridicule.
The public tormented him with an unending parade of fiddlers, Punch-and-Judys, stilt-walkers, fanatic psalmists, and tub-thumpers. Some neighbors hired musicians to play outside his windows. Others willfully annoyed him with worn-out or damaged wind instruments. Placards were hung in local shops, abusing him. During one 80-day period Babbage counted 165 nuisances. One brass band played for five hours, with only a brief intermission. Another blew a penny tin whistle out his window toward Babbage's garden for a half and hour daily, for "many months".
When Babbage went out, children followed and cursed him. Adults followed, too, but at a distance. Over a hundred people once skulked behind him before he could find a constable to disperse them. Dead cats and other "offensive materials" were thrown at his house. Windows were broken. A man told him, "You deserve to have your house burnt up, and yourself in it, and I will do it for you, you old villain". Even when he was on his deathbed, the organ-grinders ground implacably away.
In Babbage's relation with "the Mob", we see is curious naïveté in matters social. Though he was far above the rabble - "not unknown" to the Duke of Wellington and Lord Ashley - he seemed unaware of it at times. He expected the same civility from a drunken brothel-keeper as he would from a gentleman. In 1860, the London of the multitudinous poor was far from gentle. Yet, in his ingenuousness, he could fathom neither bums nor bamboozlers. He would cross town to check the tale of a mendicant, and frequently was surprised to encounter deceit.
Babbage once met a man who claimed not to have eaten for two days. Babbage invited him to breakfast. The next morning he called Babbage's house, claiming hard times. Eventually, the man hired on as a steward on a small West Indian ship. " A few evenings after the ship had supposed to have sailed, he called at my house", wrote Babbage, "apparently much agitated and stated that, in raising the anchor, an accident had happened, by which the captain's leg had been broken". Babbage later tried to verify this tale, but found his steward "had been living riotously at some public-house in another quarter, and had been continually drunk".
Babbage never understood that the growth and crowdedness of London resulted from the industrial expansion he championed. By 1850 industry had taken over in Britain. "Many years before, I had purchased a house in a very quiet locality", he wrote in 1864. Then came a hackney stand, and beer shops and coffeehouses, and people. The din beneath his window, the German bands, the pickpockets, came with industry. The railroad and factory brought crowds to London, and with them came meanness and thievery.
THE NEWTONIAN
Like Newton, Babbage was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He founded both the British Association's Statistical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. His Difference Engine calculated by Newton's method of successive differences, and would even accomplish "operations of human intellect" by motive power. Babbage believed in a world where, once all things were dutifully quantified, all things could be predicted. As such, he was a perfect Newtonian.
Nature, according to Question 31 of Newton's Opticks is "very consonant and conformable to herself". Newton's program was official in Babbage's time. Science "consisted in isolating some central, specific act, and then using it as the basis for all further deductions concerning given set of phenomena", writes Ilya Prigogine in Order Out of Chaos (Bantam, 1984). The Marquis Laplace, and avid Newtonian and friend of Babbage, said that if a mind could know everything about particle behavior, it could describe everything: "Nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, could be present to out eyes".
Babbage wanted to quantify everything. Fact and data intoxicated him. He tried mathematically handicapping horse races (he was unsuccessful, and Lady Lovelace was nearly disgraced by gambling debts). Babbage's love of numbers was well known: in the mail he received requests for statistics. He would preserve any fact, simply because he thought "the preservation of any fact might ultimately be useful".
He would stop to measure the heartbeat of a pig (to be listed in his "Table of Constants of the Class Mammalia"), or to affix a numerical value to the breath of a calf. In 1856 he proposed to the Smithsonian Institution that an effort be made to produce "Tables of Constants of Nature and Art", which would "contain all those facts which can be expressed by numbers in the various sciences and arts".
Babbage delighted in the thought of having a daily account of food consumed by zoo animals, or the "proportion of sexes amongst our poultry". He proposed tables to calibrate the amount of wood (elm or oak) a man would saw in 10 hours, or how much an ox or camel could plow or mow in a day.
Babbage's unflagging fascination with statistics occasionally overwhelmed him, as is seen in the animation of his Smithsonian proposal. "If I should be successful", he write, "... it will thus call into action a permanent cause of advancement toward truth, continually leading to the more accurate determination of established fact, and to the discovery and measurement of new ones".
In Mechanics Magazine in 1857 Babbage published a "Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breaking of Plate Glass Windows" detailing 464 breakages, of which "drunken men, women, or boys" were responsible for 14. Babbage thought the table would be "of value in many respects", and might "induce others to furnish more extensive collections of similar and related facts".
Babbage faced significant problems with mechanical techniques. He had to invent the tools for his engine. His thought is so thoroughly modern that we wonder why he did not pursue electromechanical methods for his engines (especially after Faraday's 1831 discovery of induction, and Babbage's own electrical experiments). It is easy to forget how long ago Babbage worked.
Even under the best of circumstances, the limitations of Newtonian physics might have prevented Babbage from completing any Analytical Engine. He did not know the advances of Maxwell (and could not know those of Boltmann, Gödel, and Heisenberg). Though he knew Fourier socially, Babbage did not seem to grasp the importance of his 1811 work on heat propagation. Nor did he seem to know of Joule's efforts with heat and mechanical energy.
The reversibility of attraction is a basic tenet of Newtonian mechanics. A body, or piece of information, may retrace its path and return to where it started. In Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine, the discrete functions of mill (in which "all operations are performed") and store (in which all numbers are originally placed, and, once computed, are returned) rely on this supposition of reversibility.
In his 1824 essay on heat, Carnot formulated the first quantitative expression of irreversibility, by showing that a heat engine cannot convert all supplied heat energy into mechanical energy. Part of it is converted to useful work, but most is expelled into a low-temperature reservoir and is wasted.
From this came William Thomson's discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in 1852, and Rudolf Clausius' discovery of entropy in 1865. In ideal, reversible processes, entropy remains constant. But in others, as Eddington showed with his "arrow of time", entropy only increases. That means information cannot be shuttled between mill and store without leaking, like faulty sacks of flour. Babbage did not consider this, and it was perhaps his greatest obstacle to building the engine.
It is easy to forget that Babbage was essentially a child of the Enlightenment, and that his epoch was much different from our own. He resided in an era of wood and coal, and the later era of steel and oil would not begin for perhaps a decade after his death.
THE INDUSTRIALIST
"Faith in machinery", wrote Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy in 1869, "is our besetting danger". The Whiggery of the mid-Victorian era optimistically endorsed the principle of progress. Britain changed from the relatively pastoral society of 1820 to the brutishly materialistic one of the 1840's and 1850's.
Babbage shared his era's enthusiasm for industry. His finest work, On the Economy of Manufactures, was published in 1832. In it, with watch in hand, Babbage discovers operational research, the scientific study of manufacturing processes. It is a tour of the manufacturing processes of the period, from needle-making to tanning. Babbage detailed how things both ornamental and functional were made in mid-nineteenth century Britain. His characteristically blunt analysis of the printing trade caused publishers to refuse his books.
Babbage worked when industry was in a frenzy to improve and expand. Increases in manufactories and population were viewed as "absolute goods in themselves", noted Matthew Arnold. In Das Kapital, Marx quoted from Economy of Manufactures on this rage to improve: "Improvements succeeded each other so rapidly, that machines which had never been finished were abandoned in the hands of their makers, because new improvements had superseded their utility".
Babbage disliked Plato, according to his friend Wilmot Buxton, because of Plato's condemnation of Archytas, "who had constructed machines of extraordinary power on mathematical principles". Plato thought such an application of geometry degraded a noble intellectual exercise, "reducing it to the low level of a craft fit only for mechanics and artisans".
Babbage loved practical science, and was among the first to apply higher mathematics to certain commercial and industrial problems. He took no part in what Anthony Hyman (in his book, Charles Babbage, Princeton University Press, 1982) called the era's "growing divorce between academic science and engineering practice".
Babbage had a forge built in his house on Devonshire Street, and accomplished, with his draftsmen, pioneering work in precision engineering. Because conventional mechanical drawing proved inadequate for his engines, he had to develop his own abstract notation. He called his work with mechanical notation "one of the most important additions I have made to human knowledge".
With the die-cast pewter gear wheels of his Difference Engine, and with his design of lathes and tool-shapers, Babbage did much to advance the British machine tool industry. Sir Joseph Whitworth, foreman in Babbage's shop, was responsible for the introduction of the first series of standard screw threads.
The expansion of the railways marked the grandest phase of the industrial revolution. Railroads freed manufacturing from its dependence on water transport, and opened new markets. When the first public railroad, the Stockton & Darlington, opened on Sept. 27, 1823, Babbage was 34. By 1841 there were over 1,300 miles of rail in Britain and 13,500 miles by 1870.
J. D. Bernal wrote in Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (University of Indiana Press, 1970), that "Babbage seems to have been one of the few who interested themselves scientifically in its [the railroad's] working". Babbage's life was intertwined with the railroad. He invented a cow catcher in 1838, apparently the first in Britain. He was present for opening ceremonies of George Stephenson's Manchester & Liverpool line in 1830. Of the cheering crowds at the initial run, he wrote, "I feared... the people madly attempting to stop by their feeble arms the momentum of our enormous train".
Babbage's great formal association with railroads came in 1837 and 1838, when he conducted experiments for I. K. Brunel's Great Western Railway, which ran from London to Bristol. Babbage argued for the superiority of Brunel's wide gauge track. His research into the safety and efficiency of the line was, according to Bernal, "100 years ahead of his time".
Babbage rode the rails like a river pilot road the Mississippi: knowing every turn on the route, every crossing, every intersection. "My ear", he wrote, "had become peculiarly sensitive to the distant sound of an engine".
Copyright J. A. N. Lee, September 1994.
Last updated 94/09/30
THE MISANTHROPE
Babbage was known as a "mathematical Timon". In his later years he came to suffer from a mechanist's misanthropy, regarding men as fools and grubby thieves. By 1861 he said he had never spent a happy day in his life, and would gladly give up the rest of it if he could live three days 500 years thence.
Laughed at by costermongers and viscounts, met with diffidence by his lessers, the impatient Babbage grew angry, like the cave-dwelling Timon, with a changing world. Nevertheless, as his friend Lionel Tollemache wrote, "there was something harmless and even kindly in his misanthropy, for... he hated mankind rather than man, and his aversion was lost in its own generality".
Like Shakespeare's Timon, Babbage would have made a fascinating leader. (Sheepshanks, of course, disagreed: "I don't know any Government office or any other office for which he is fit, certainly none which requires sense and good temper".)
What a delightful, if distracting, place it would be where Babbage was in charge. Consider his plan in Economy of Manufactures for a "simple contrivance of tin tubes for speaking through". (Babbage calculated it would take 17 minutes for words spoken in London to reach Liverpool.) Or his plan for sending messages "enclosed in small cylinders", along wires suspended from high pillars (he thought church steeples could be used for this purpose.)
In Passages, Babbage relates how, as a youth, he nearly drowned while testing his contrivance for walking on water. In Conjectures on the Conditions of the Surface of the Moon, we find him describing his 1837 experiments cooking a "very respectable stew of meat and vegetables" in blackened boxes (with window glass) buried in the earth. Toward the end of his life we find him mulling the prevention of bank note forgery and working in marine navigation we realize that, with his harlequin curiosity about all things, with his wonderfully human sense of wonder, Babbage escapes pathos and attains greatness.
Quotations
Some of my critics have amused their readers with the wildness of the schemes I have occasionally thrown out; and I myself have sometimes smiled along with them. Perhaps it were wiser for present reputation to offer nothing but profoundly meditated plans, but I do not think knowledge will be most advanced by that course; such sparks may kindle the energies of other minds more favorably circumstanced for pursuing the enquiries. (On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 1832, preface to second edition.)
Every moment dies a man/Every moment 1 1/16
is born.
(A correction to Tennyson's "Ev'ry moment a man dies/Ev'ry moment one is
born".)
If unwarned by my example, any man shall undertake and shall succeed in really constructing an engine ... upon difference principles or by simpler means, I have no fear of leaving my reputation in his charge, for he alone will be fully able to appreciate the nature of my efforts and the value of their results.[2]
Bibliography
Biographical
Babbage, Henry P. (ed). 1889. Babbage's Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them, Their History, and Construction, E. and F. N. Spoon, London.
Babbage, H. P. 1910. "Babbage's Analytical Engine", reprinted in Randell, Brian (ed). 1982. Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 19-54.
Babbage, Neville F. 1991. "Autopsy Report on the Body of Charles Babbage ("the father of the computer")", Medical Jour. of Australia, Vol. 154, pp. 758-9.
Bromley, Alan G. 1982. "Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 4, No. 3.
Campbell-Kelly, Martin. 1988. "Charles Babbage's Table of Logarithms", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 10, No. 3.
Campbell-Kelly, Martin, (ed). 1989 The Works of Charles Babbage, Pickering and Chatto, London. 11 Volumes.
Cohen, I. Bernard. 1988. "Babbage and Aiken", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 10, No. 3.
Davies, Donald Watts. 1990. "Babbage's Friend", (CQD), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 12, No. 2.
Dubbey, J. M. 1978. The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, viii, 236 pp.
Froehlich, Leopold. March 1985. "Babbage Observed", Datamation, Cahners/Ziff Pub. Assoc.
Gridgeman, N.T. 1979. The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (review), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 1, No. 1.
Halacy, Dan. 1970. Charles Babbage, Father of the Computer, Macmillan Co., New York.
Harrison, Thomas J. April 1986. "Charles and the Computer", Measurement and Control, Vol. 19, pp. 84-91.
Hyman, Anthony. 1982. Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton NJ.
Hyman, Anthony. 1989. "Babbage Studies", (CQD), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 11, No. 3.
Huskey, Harry and Velma. 1980. "Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 299-329.
Huskey, Harry and Velma. 1981. "Charles Babbage and Lady Lovelace", (anecdote), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 3, No. 4.
Huskey, Velma. 1985. "Who Was the Mysterious Countess?", (anecdote), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 7, No. 1.
Kean, David W. 1966. The Author of the Analytical Engine, Thompson Book Co., Washington DC. 21 pp.
Morrison, Philip and Emily. 1961. Charles Babbage and his Calculating Machines, Dover Publications, New York, 400 pp.
Nagler, Harry. 1980. "Napier and Babbage", (anecdote), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 2, No. 2.
Robert, C. J. D. 1987. "Babbage's Diff. Eng. No.1 and ... Sine Tables", (CQD), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 9, No. 2.
Slater, Robert. 1987. Portraits in Silicon, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, Chapter 1.
Smillie, K. W. 1981. "Mr. Babbage's Calculating Machine", (review), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 2, No. 2.
van Sinderen, Alfred. 1980. "The Printed Papers of Charles Babbage", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 169-185.
van Sinderen, Alfred. 1981. "The Trinity House", (correction), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 3, No. 1.
van Sinderen, Alfred. 1983. A. Hyman: Charles Babbage (review), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 5, No. 1.
van Sinderen, Alfred. 1983. "Babbage's Letter to Quetelet", May 1835, Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 5 No. 3.
van Sinderen, Alfred. 1988. "Babbage and the Scheutz Machine ...", (anecdote), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 10, No. 2.
van Sinderen, Alfred. 1988. "Babbage and Bowditch", (CQD), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 10, No. 3.
Wilkes, Maurice V. 1983[3]. "Babbage, Charles" in Ralston, Anthony, and Edwin D. Reilly, Jr. 1983. Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering, Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York.
Wilkes, Maurice V. 1987. "Babbage's Expectations for the Diff. Engine", (anecdote), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 9, No. 2.
Wilkes, Maurice V. 1988. "Babbage and the Colossus", (CQD), Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 10, No. 3.
Wilkes, Maurice V. 1991a. "Babbage's Expectations for his Engines", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 141-46.
Wilkes, Maurice V. 1991b. "Pray, Mr. Babbage ...", A Play, Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 147-54.
Wilkes, Maurice V. 1992. "Charles Babbage - The Great Uncle of Computing?", Comm. ACM, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 15-16, 21.
Significant Publications
Babbage, Charles. 1825. "Observations on the Application of Machinery to the Computation of Mathematical Tables", Memoirs of the Astronomical Society, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 311-314.
Babbage, Charles. 1832. Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Charles Knight, London.
Babbage, Charles. 1837. "On the Mathematical Powers of the Calculating Engine", unpublished MS, reprinted in Randell, B. (ed). 1973. The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 19-54.
Babbage, Charles. 1864. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, Longmans and Green, London reprinted Augustus M. Kelly, New York, 1969.
Footnotes
[1] Reprinted from DATAMATION, March 1985
[2] Quoted in the Babbage exhibit at the Science Museum, Kensington, attributed
to Babbage in 1864.
[3] Also in the 3rd edition, 1992.
In 1991, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Babbage, the Science Museum in Kensington, England, constructed a complete Difference Engine from the drawings left behind by Babbage. They found only two major errors in the drawings; they were easy to remedy.
Doron Swade, Curator at the Science Museum
with the Difference Engine.
Copyright J. A. N. Lee, September 1994.
Last updated 94/09/30
Nos USA, houve um Hollerith
http://www.computer-museum.org/collections/hollerith.html
Hollerith Manual Card Punch
1930s
Hermann Hollerith, in an effort to win the United States Census Bureau competition, began experimenting with mechanical tabulation methods, and in 1884 he patented the first "Census Machine."
Hollerith won the competition. The machine was used to tabulate the 1890 United States Census in record time.
Hollerith formed a company to produce a series of improved machines incorporating the tabulator and punched cards. He built an international clientele which included railway offices, the Czarist government of Russia and other foreign governments, department stores, insurance offices, and United States government bureaus.
The Hollerith tabulating system was the first to make practical use of the punched card in data processing. His machines became the nucleus of today's computing industry.
Hollerith developed the tabulator in response to the need to expedite and simplify the tabulating of statistical information gathered in the 1890 United States Census. Statistical data on sex, age, location, family size, birth date and nationality were punched in predetermined locations on the card.
The cards were automatically tabulated and semi-automatically sorted. Electric wires in the card reader made contact with mercury in a cup through holes in the cards to complete an electric circuit and "read" the data. The electric signal from the contact activated the relevant counter on the panel and caused the hand to register the count. Each cabinet tabulated one type of data. The count appeared first on dials representing each state and then in an overall national total.
After its initial use in the 1890 census, the Hollerith system was adapted by commerce and industry for accounting, cost distribution, inventory control, time and payroll records.
Hollerith developed and patented many related devices and in 1896 established the Tabulating Machine Company to manufacture his inventions. The company grew and prospered. In 1911, it merged with others to form the Computing, Tabulating and Recording Company. In 1915, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. was made president and in 1924, the company became International Business Machines Corporation.
IBM made the punch-card technology into the business standard of the 1950's and 1960's.
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http://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/story
IBM was incorporated in the state of New York on June 15, 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. But its origins can be traced back to 1890, during the height of the Industrial Revolution, when the United States was experiencing waves of immigration. The U.S. Census Bureau knew its traditional methods of counting would not be adequate for measuring the population, so it sponsored a contest to find a more efficient means of tabulating census data. products1
The winner was Herman Hollerith, a German immigrant and Census Bureau statistician, whose Punch Card Tabulating Machine used an electric current to sense holes in punch cards and keep a running total of data. Capitalizing on his success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Co. in 1896.
In 1911, Charles R. Flint, a noted trust organizer, engineered the merger of Hollerith's company with two others, Computing Scale Co. of America and International Time Recording Co. The combined Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., or C-T-R, manufactured and sold machinery ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders to meat and cheese slicers and, of course, tabulators and punch cards. Based in New York City, the company had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, N.Y.; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit, Mich.; Washington, D.C., and Toronto, Canada.
When the diversified businesses of C-T-R proved difficult to manage, Flint turned for help to the former No. 2 executive at the National Cash Register Co., Thomas J. Watson. In 1914, Watson, age 40, joined the company as general manager.
The son of Scottish immigrants, Watson had been a top salesman at NCR, but left after clashing with its autocratic leader, John Henry Patterson. However, Watson did adopt some of Patterson's more effective business tactics: generous sales incentives, an insistence on well-groomed, dark-suited salesmen and an evangelical fervor for instilling company pride and loyalty in every worker. Watson boosted company spirit with employee sports teams, family outings and a company band. He preached a positive outlook, and his favorite slogan, "THINK," became a mantra for C-T-R's employees.
Watson also stressed the importance of the customer, a lasting IBM tenet. He understood that the success of the client translated into the success of his company, a belief that, years later, manifested itself in the popular adage, "Nobody was ever fired for buying from IBM."
Within 11 months of joining C-T-R, Watson became its president. The company focused on providing large-scale, custom-built tabulating solutions for businesses, leaving the market for small office products to others. During Watson's first four years, revenues doubled to $2 million. He also expanded the company's operations to Europe, South America, Asia and Australia. In 1924, to reflect C-T-R's growing worldwide presence, its name was changed to International Business Machines Corp., or IBM.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, IBM managed to grow while the rest of the U.S. economy floundered. Watson took care of his employees. IBM was among the first corporations to provide group life insurance (1934), survivor benefits (1935) and paid vacations (1936). While most businesses had shut down, Watson kept his workers busy producing new machines even while demand was slack. Thanks to the resulting large inventory of equipment, IBM was ready when the Social Security Act of 1935 brought the company a landmark government contract to maintain employment records for 26 million people. It was called "the biggest accounting operation of all time," and it went so well that orders from other U.S. government departments quickly followed.
The Social Security deal was secured even while IBM was at odds with another branch of the federal government. The Justice Department filed an antitrust case against IBM and Remington-Rand in 1932, alleging that the two companies, which controlled virtually the entire market for punch card machines, were illegally requiring customers to buy their punch cards. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the Justice Department in 1936.
In subsequent years, IBM's size and success would inspire numerous antitrust actions. A 1952 suit by the Justice Department, settled four years later, forced IBM to sell its tabulating machines -- at the time, IBM offered them only through leases -- in order to establish a competing, used-machine market. Another federal antitrust suit dragged on for thirteen years until the Justice Department concluded it was "without merit" and dropped it in 1982. IBM's competitors filed 20 antitrust actions during the 1970s. None succeeded.
1.3 - As Fases da ComputaçãoDepois do fracasso de Babbage’s, pouco progresso foi feito em construir computadores digitais até a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Por volta de meados dos anos 40, Howard Aiken em Harvard, John von Neumann no Instituto para Estudos Avançados em Princeton, J. Presper Eckert e Willian Mauchley na Universidade da Pensilvânia, e Konrad Zuse na Alemanha, entre outros, todos tiveram sucesso em construir máquinas de calcular usando válvulas. Essas máquinas eram enormes e de funcionamento lento e duvidoso.
O ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) foi o primeiro computador digital de propósito geral. Criado para a realização de cálculos balísticos, sua estrutura possuía 18 mil válvulas, 10 mil capacitores, 70 mil resistores e pesava 30 toneladas. Quando em operação, consumia cerca de 140 quilowatts e era capaz de realizar 5 mil adições por segundo.
http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwmintro.html
http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/96summary/
http://inventors.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa060298.htm?TMog=373213434105358&Mint=373213434105358
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http://www.cs.yale.edu/~tap/photo_gallery.html
Nestes tempos, um grupo isolado de pessoas designadas, construíram, programaram, operaram, e mantiveram cada máquina. Toda programação era feita em linguagens de máquinas, muitas vezes fazendo a ligação através de fios em mesa de plugs para controlar as funções básicas da máquina. As Linguagens de programação eram desconhecidas ( nem mesmo a linguagem assembly).Os Sistemas Operacionais eram desconhecidos. O modelo usual de operação era por programador, reservava-se um horário na folha de horário na parede, entrava-se na sala da máquina, inseria sua mesa de plugs no computador, e gastava as próximas horas na esperança de que nenhuma das 20.000 válvulas a vácuo iriam queimar enquanto rodava o programa. Virtualmente, todos os problemas eram cálculos numéricos, como imprimir tabelas de senos e cossenos.
Para trabalhar nessas máquinas, era necessário conhecer profundamente o funcionamento do hardware, pois a programação era feita em painéis , através de fios, utilizando linguagem de máquina. Nessa fase, ainda não existia o conceito de sistema operacional.
Outros computadores foram construídos nessa mesma época, como o EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer) e o Ias (Princiceton Institute for Advanced Studies) , porém suas utilizações ficavam restritas, praticamente, às universidades e aos órgãos militares.
Com o desenvolvimento da indústria de computadores, muitas empresas foram fundadas ou investiram no setor, como a Sperry e a Ibm, o que levou à criação dos primeiros computadores para aplicações comerciais. A primeira máquina fabricada com esse propósito e bem sucedida foi o UNIVACI(Universal Automatic Computer), criado para ser usado no censo americano de 1950.
As rotinas foram melhoradas com a introdução dos cartões perfurados. Era agora possível escrever e ler programas em cartões, ao invés de usar as mesas de plug. Mas o modo de processamento não foi alterado.
Através dos circuitos integrados (CIs) e, posteriormente, dos microprocessadores, foi possível viabilizar e difundir o uso de sistemas computacionais por empresas, devido à diminuição de seus custos de aquisição e utilização. Além disso, houve grande aumento do poder de processamento e diminuição no tamanho dos equipamentos.
Baseada nessa nova tecnologia, a IBM lançou em 1964 a série 360. Esse lançamento causou uma revolução na indústria de informática, pois introduzia uma linha (família) de computadores pequena, poderosa e, principalmente, compatíveis entre si. Isso permitiu que uma empresa adquirisse um modelo mais simples e barato e, conforme suas necessidades, mudasse para modelos com mais recursos, sem comprometer suas aplicações já desenvolvidas. Para essa série, foi desenvolvido o sistema operacional OS/360, que tentava atender todos os tipos de aplicações e periféricos. Apesar de todos os problemas desse equipamento e de seu tamanho físico, a série 360 introduziu novas técnicas, utilizadas até hoje.
Na mesma época, a DEC lançou a linha PDP-8, também revolucionária, pois apresentava uma linha de computadores pequena e barata, se comparada aos mainframes até então comercializados, criando um novo mercado, o de minicomputadores.
A evolução dos processadores de entrada/saída permitiu que, enquanto um programa esperasse por uma operação de leitura/gravação, o processador executasse um outro programa. Para tal, a memória foi dividida em partições, onde cada programa esperava sua vez para ser processado. A essa técnica de compartilhamento de memória principal e processador deu-se o nome de multiprogramação.
Com a substituição das fitas por discos no processo de submissão dos programas, o processamento batch tornou-se mais eficiente, pois permitia a alteração na ordem de execução das tarefas, até então puramente seqüencial. A essa técnica de submissão de programas chamou-se spooling, que mais tarde, também viria a ser utlizada no processo de impressão.
Os sistemas operacionais, mesmo implementando o processamento batch e a multiprogramação, ainda estavam limitados a processamentos que não exigiam comunicação com o usuário. Para permitir a interação rápida entre o usuário e o computador, foram adicionados terminais de vídeo e teclado (interação on-line).
A multiprogramação evoluiu preocupada em oferecer aos usuários tempos de respostas razoáveis e uma interface cada vez mais amigável. Para tal, cada programa na memória utilizaria o processador em pequenos intervalos de tempo. A esse sistema de divisão de tempo do processador chamou-se time-sharing (tempo compartilhado).
Outro fato importante nessa fase, foi o surgimento do sistema operacional UNIX (1969). O UNIX foi inicialmente concebido em um minicomputador PDP-7, baseado no sistema Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service). Posteriormente, o UNIX foi reescrito em uma linguagem de alto nível (linguagem C), tornando-se conhecido por sua portabilidade.
No final desta fase, com a evolução dos microprocessadores, surgiram os primeiros microcomputadores, muito mais baratos que qualquer um dos computadores até então comercializados. Dentre eles, destacamos os micros de 8 bits da Apple e o sistema operacional CP/M (Control Program Monitor).
A integração em larga escala (large scale integration - LSI) e a integração em muita larga escal (very large scale integration - VLSI) levaram adiante o projeto de miniaturização e barateamento dos equipamentos. Os míni e superminicomputadores se firmaram no mercado e os microcomputadores ganharam um grande impulso.
Nesse quadro surgiram os microcomputadores PC (Personal Computer) de 16 bits da IBM e o sistema operacional DOS (Disk Operation System), criando a filosofia dos computadores pessoais. Na área dos mínis e superminicomputadores ganharam impulso os sistemas multiusuários, com destaque para os sistemas compatíveis com o Unix (Unix-like) e o VMS da DEC.
No final dos anos 80, os computadores tiveram um grande avanço, decorrente de aplicações que exigiam um enorme volume de cálculos. Para acelerar o processamento, foram adicionados outros processadores, exigindo dos sistemas operacionais novos mecanismos de controle e sincronismo. Com o multiprocessamento, foi possível a execução de mais de um programa simultaneamente, ou até a execução de um mesmo programa por mais de um processador.
Além do surgimento de equipamentos com múltiplos processadores, foram introduzidos processadores vetoriais e técnicas de paralelismo em diferentes níveis, fazendo com que os computadores se tornassem ainda mais poderosos.
As redes de computadores (network computers) se difundiram por todo o mundo, permitindo o acesso a outros sistemas de computação, independentemente de estado, país e, até mesmo, fabricante. Os softwares de rede passaram a estar intimamente relacionados ao sistema operacional.
A partir de 1979, foi incorporado ao PDP-11, a família de micro processadores LSI-11. A DEC (Digital Equipament Corporation) usa o rótulo do PDP-11/03 quando o LSI-11 ou o LSI-11/2 são acoplados com uma base e uma unidade de força; o mesmo acontece com o LSI-11/23 que neste caso se torna o PDP-11/23.
A mais nova versão (1979), o LSI-11/23, mantém a mesma arquitetura da via do LSI/11, mas possui maior velocidade de execução, um maior conjunto de instruções e um maior domínio de endereçamento direto.
Todos os processadores LSI-11 utilizam uma versão reduzida do Unibus, uma estrutura de via que é mais conhecida como o Q-Bus. O Q-Bus consiste em 72 linhas (40 linhas de sinais, 10 de força, 8 de terra e 14 linhas extras). O LSI-11 e o LSI-11/2 usam 16 linhas para endereçamento e, portanto, podem endereçar diretamente apenas 64K bytes (ou 32K palavras de 16 bits); o LSI-11/23 soma duas linhas de endereçamento de linhas, não usadas previamente para fornecer endereçamento direto para até 256K bytes (ou 128K palavras de 16 bits).
A interrupção forçada de E/S usa o processador mais eficientemente e, portanto, torna-se o método mais usado. O bit 6 no CSR é usado como um bit de controle que possibilita a interrupção; o processador pode ativar o dispositivo quando houver necessidade de interrupções, então estará livre para executar outras tarefas enquanto espera pelos dados.
O software de apoio é mais um dos principais motivos da popularidade do LSI-11. Entre os fabricantes de minicomputadores, muitos usuários consideram o software da DEC como o melhor de todos. Também muitos programas especiais (incluindo assemblers “cruzados”, editores de vídeo, pacotes aritméticos e editores de processamento de palavras) estão disponíveis através da DECUS, Sociedade dos Usuários da Digital Equipment Corporation - Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society. Outros fabricantes oferecem sistemas operacionais alternativos e linguagens adicionais.
O LSI-11 e o LSI-11/2 são apoiados pelo DEC por meio do Sistema Operacional RT-11 (Real Timie-11), que inclui monitores de monoprogramação e de background/foreground, gerenciador de arquivos, um editor de linhas, um macro assembler, bibliotecário e outros utilitários. As linguagens de alto nível disponíveis junto a este sistema operacional incluem o FORTRAN IV, BASIC, MULTIUSER BASIC e FOCAL. O atual RT-11 BASIC é uma linguagem da DEC similar ao BASIC, mas possui vantagens distintas em aplicações de tempo real.
O LSI-11/23 é também apoido pelo sistema operacional RSX-11M ou RSX-11S que apresenta facilidades de múltiplas tarefas e múltiplos usuários. Com este sistema operacional, versões aperfeiçoadas do BASIC, do FORTRAN e do ANSI 74 COBOL estão disponíveis, como também o software para gerenciamento de dados e comunicações intersistemas.