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Abacus
Also known as the counting frame, invented by the Chinese. It consists of a frame with sliding beads on about 13 sticks. The beads on the sliding stick are divided into two parts, fives beads in the bottom part that represent 1s and 2 beads on top representing 5s. -
Pascal’s Gear system
Invented by Blaise Pascal, first mechanical calculator. Consists of a gear representing ones, another representing tens, so on. One gear would have 1 tooth, another gear 10; so that one would have to crank one gear 10 times to rotate the next gear once. -
Arithmometer
Invented by Charles Xavier Thomas, the first commercially successful mechanical calculator. Can perform addition and subtraction, as well as multiplication and division. -
The Difference Engine
Invented by Charles Babbage, first fully automated calculator, steam powered. Capable of tabulating polynomial function. Only one, the prototype was built by Charles Babbage. -
The Analytical Engine
Invented by Charles Babbage. Significantly improved version of his previous calculator. Was never built during his lifetime due to funding issues. -
The Tabulating Machine
Invented by Herman Hollerith. The machine had the ability to record information on a card. This reduced human reading errors and significantly memory storage capacity. -
Vacuum/Electron tube
Invented by Lee De Forest. It is a glass tube with a vacuum inside; acts as a switch or amplifier for controlling electron currents. These vacuum tubes produced large amounts of heat and was rather large in size. It was later replaced by transistors. -
Harvard Mark 1
Invented by Howard Aiken in collaboration with IBM; capable of computing 23 decimal place numbers, and all arithmetic operations without human intervention. -
Punched Cards & Paper Tape
Information is imprinted onto a card. In picture is a stack of 62,500 cards, approximately 5 MB. -
Magnetic Drums Memory
Invented by Gustav Tauschek, similar to a disk drive, but a drum instead of a disk. Held approximately 32 kB. -
Magnetic Core Memory
Composed of tiny donut shaped magnets strung onto wires that could be magnetized for 0 or 1. -
The Turing Machine
Invented by Alan Turing, a hypothetical machine that would compute a set of commands by reading information on a strip of tape methodically. -
Delay Line Memory
Provided sequential access memory, where programs are stored as memory but can only be access in a specific order. -
Z3
Invented by Konrad Zuse, used a binary system of 0s and 1s. The first programmable automatic digital electromechanical computer. -
RAM
Introduced by John von Neumann. By using random access memory, computers no longer needed to have a fixed structure, they could be programmed without modifying the hardware. Programs could simply be stored in RAM and accessed when needed, instead of reprogramming every time a different program was needed. -
Williams-Kilburn tube
Invented by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn. The first RAM device, it used a cathode ray tube to store binary data. Stores about 512 to 2048 bits of data. -
Transistor
Invented by William Shockley and Walter Brattain. The transistor allowed electronics to be much smaller in size and cheaper to produce. -
Magnetic Hard Disks/RAMAC 350
The world’s first disk drive. Stores approximately 62,500 card’s worth of data. It has 50 24 inch disks capable of 1,200 rpm, about 60 milliseconds to retrieve data. A robotic arm wrote and read the data on the disk. -
Integrated circuit
Invented by Jack St. Clair Kilby. The invention of Transistor allowed electrical currents to be control in a much more compact manner. Thus instead of housing giant machines with large vacuum tubes, the entire hardware could be built into a circuit board. Through discoveries and advancements in semiconductor devices and fabrication; silicon, can be thinner and thinner, allowing for even more efficient chips. From being 10 micrometers in width in 1971, to 14 nanometers in 2013, circuits have appr -
Virtual Memory
This increased the efficiency of smaller computers by using the disk drive to store programs not currently in use by RAM. -
Optical Storage
Information is recorded on a disk and read by a laser. -
Floppy Disks
Primary media distribution device; 8-inch disks held up to 1.2 MB; 5 ¼ held up to 10 MB; 3 ½ held up to 200MB by the end of 1999. -
Semiconductor Memory
Stores memory through using a switch to switch between two states or stores charge/no charge for 1 or 0. -
Magnetic Tape Library
This non-volatile method to storing information allowed for much more capacity for storage at the expense of speed. Each tape could store up to 160 MB of data. -
Intel 4004
First mass marketed microprocessor. It is 12*12mm large and has 2.3k transistors capable of 90,000 operations per second. It introduced 4-bit architecture -
Intel 8008
It is 14*14mm large and has 3.5k transistors. This allowed the computer to handle uppercase letters, numbers and symbols. It introduced 8-bit architecture -
The Altair/Microsoft
The world’s first pc, made by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). Later on, William Gates and Paul Allen would present the BASIC program to Ed Roberts, the owner of MITS, and Microsoft would be formed. -
Intel 8088
Features 29k transistors at 33*33mm large. It introduced 16-bit architecture -
Flash Memory
Invented by Fujio Masuoka, the device is named after it’s ability to quickly erase data. -
Deskpro 386
First mass marketed computer; featuring 275k transistors capable of 4 million operations per second and 4kB of memory. It introduced 32-bit architecture. -
64-bit architecture
Companies such as Powerpc, DEC, and HP begin featuring computers with 64-bit architecture. -
Quantum Computer
By harnessing the potential of quantum superposition and quantum entanglement, data no longer have to be encoded into binary digits, instead it can be represented by using quantum properties. -
Chemical Computer
Data are represented by varying concentrations of different chemicals, computations are performed through chemical reactions. -
DNA Computer
By bioengineering DNA into a method to store and access information, DNA computers can be smaller and more efficient than conventional computers. -
Optical Computing
This method replaces electrons with photons. This allows for a much higher bandwidth but more importantly, to replace conventional transistors with optical transistors which are much more smaller than conventional ones.
