history of the comoputer

By tito98

  • Abacus

    Attempts by humans to develop a tool to manipulate data go back as far as 2600 BC when the Chinese came up with the abacus. The slide rule was invented in 1621 and remained widely used until the emergence of electronic calculators in the 1970s.

  • Charles babbage

    In 1830 the English mathematician Charles Babbage conceived an analytical engine, which could be programmed with punched cards to carry out calculations. It was different from its predecessors because it was able to make decisions based on its own computations, such as sequential control, branching and looping.
    Almost all computers in use today follow this basic idea laid out by Babbage, which is why he is often referred to as 'the father of computers.'

  • First electronic computer

    Many different types of mechanical devices followed that built on the idea of the analytical engine. The very first electronic computers were developed by Konrad Zuse in Germany in the period 1935 to 1941. Konrad was a German civil engineer, inventor and computer pioneer. The Z3, the first fully operational electromechanical computer, was partially financed by German government, which wanted their extensive calculations automated. . The original was destroyed in World War II.

  • Engines of Calculation

    Neither the abacus, nor the mechanical calculators constructed by Pascal and Leibniz really qualified as computers. A calculator is a device that makes it quicker and easier for people to do sums—but it needs a human operator. A computer, on the other hand, is a machine that can operate automatically, without any human help, by following a series of stored instructions called a program (a kind of mathematical recipe). Calculators evolved into computers when people devised ways of making entirely

  • Bush and the bomb

    The history of computing remembers colorful characters like Babbage, but others who played important—if supporting—roles are less well known. At the time when C-T-R was becoming IBM, the world's most powerful calculators were being developed by US government scientist Vannevar Bush (1890–1974). In 1925, Bush made the first of a series of unwieldy contraptions with equally cumbersome names: the New Recording Product Integraph Multiplier. Later, he built a machine called the Differential Analyzer,

  • Turing—tested

    Many of the pioneers of computing were hands-on experimenters—but by no means all of them. One of the key figures in the history of 20th-century computing, Alan Turing (1912–1954) was a brilliant Cambridge mathematician whose major contributions were to the theory of how computers processed information. In 1936, at the age of just 23, Turing wrote a groundbreaking mathematical paper called "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem," in which he described a theoretic

  • The first modern computers

    The World War II years were a crucial period in the history of computing, when powerful gargantuan computers began to appear. Just before the outbreak of the war, in 1938, German engineer Konrad Zuse (1910–1995) constructed his Z1, the world's first programmable binary computer, in his parents' living room. The following year, American physicist John Atanasoff (1903–1995) and his assistant, electrical engineer Clifford Berry (1918–1963), built a more elaborate binary machine that they named the

  • The microelectronic revolution

    Vacuum tubes were a considerable advance on relay switches, but machines like the ENIAC were notoriously unreliable. The modern term for a problem that holds up a computer program is a "bug." Popular legend has it that this word entered the vocabulary of computer programmers sometime in the 1950s when moths, attracted by the glowing lights of vacuum tubes, flew inside machines like the ENIAC, caused a short circuit, and brought work to a juddering halt. But there were other problems with vacuum

  • From nets to the Internet

    Standardized PCs running standardized software brought a big benefit for businesses: computers could be linked together into networks to share information. At Xerox PARC in 1973, electrical engineer Bob Metcalfe (1946–) developed a new way of linking computers "through the ether" (empty space) that he called Ethernet. A few years later, Metcalfe left Xerox to form his own company, 3Com, to help companies realize "Metcalfe's Law": computers become useful the more closely connected they are to oth

  • Personal computers

    By 1974, Intel had launched a popular microprocessor known as the 8080 and computer hobbyists were soon building home computers around it. The first was the MITS Altair 8800, built by Ed Roberts. With its front panel covered in red LED lights and toggle switches, it was a far cry from modern PCs and laptops. Even so, it sold by the thousand and earned Roberts a fortune. The Altair inspired a Californian electronics wizard name Steve Wozniak (1950–) to develop a computer of his own. "Woz" is ofte

  • The user revolution

    Fortunately for Apple, it had another great idea. One of the Apple II's strongest suits was its sheer "user-friendliness." For Steve Jobs, developing truly easy-to-use computers became a personal mission in the early 1980s. What truly inspired him was a visit to PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), a cutting-edge computer laboratory then run as a division of the Xerox Corporation. Xerox had started developing computers in the early 1970s, believing they would make paper (and the highly lucrative ph