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Charles Babbage
The calculating engines of English mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871) are among the most celebrated icons in the prehistory of computing. Babbage’s Difference Engine No.1 was the first successful automatic calculator and remains one of the finest examples of precision engineering of the time. Babbage is sometimes referred to as "father of computing." The International Charles Babbage Society (later the Charles Babbage Institute) took his name to honor his intellectual contributions and th -
Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith was an American statistician and inventor who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. -
Z1 Computer
It was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched tape. The Z1 was the first freely programmable computer in the world which used Boolean logic and binary floating point numbers, however it was unreliable in operation. It was completed in 1938 and financed completely from private funds. This computer was destroyed in the bombardment of Berlin in December 1943, during World War II, together with all construction plans -
GUI Intoduction
GUI stands for Graphical User Interface, sometimes pronounced as "gooey" A graphical user interface provides the user with a familiar environment in which to
work. This environment contains pushbuttons, toggle buttons, lists, menus, text boxes,
and so forth, all of which are already familiar to the user, so that he or she can
concentrate on using the application rather than on the mechanics involved in doing
things. -
Eniac
Built at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania for the War effort by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert (no relation to Columbia University's Wallace Eckert) but not delivered to the Army until just after the end of the war, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. It was 150 feet wide with 20 banks of flashing lights and about 300 times faster than the Mark 1 at addition. Wallace Eckert is c -
1st Generation Computers
The first generation of computers is said by some to have started in 1946 with ENIAC, the first 'computer' to use electronic valves (ie. vacuum tubes). Others would say it started in May 1949 with the introduction of EDSAC, the first stored program computer. Whichever, the distinguishing feature of the first generation computers was the use of electronic valves. -
UNIVAC
On June 14, 1951, the U.S. Census Bureau dedicates UNIVAC, the world's first commercially produced electronic digital computer. UNIVAC, which stood for Universal Automatic Computer, was developed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, makers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. These giant computers, which used thousands of vacuum tubes for computation, were the forerunners of today's digital computers -
2nd Generation Computers
The transition from first generation to second generation of computers was not abrupt. There was all round development in technology, designs and programming languages. Diode and transistor technology formed the basis of the electronic switches and the switching time came down to around 0.3 microseconds. -
Jack Kilby
There are few men whose insights and professional accomplishments have changed the world. Jack Kilby was one of these men. His invention of the monolithic integrated circuit - the microchip - laid the conceptual and technical foundation for the entire field of modern microelectronics. From Jack Kilby's first simple circuit has grown a worldwide integrated circuit market whose sales in 2007 totaled $219 billion. -
BASIC
high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use -
3rd Generation Computers
During the period of 1964 to 1971 Third generation computers were developed. The third generation computers emerged with the development of IC (Integrated Circuits). The invention of the IC was the greatest achievement done in the period of third generation of computers. IC was invented by Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby in 1958-59. IC is a single component containing a number of transistors. Transistors were miniaturized and placed on silicon chips, called semiconductors, which drastically increase -
Altair Computer
considered the first personal computer which was easily afforable; was sold through mail because of the advertisements there. -
Bill Gates
Entrepreneur Bill Gates founded the world's largest software business, Microsoft, with Paul Allen, and subsequently became one of the richest men in the world. After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. -
Apple II
although a vast iprovement of Apple I, still ran the same speed and processeing, however new features include color on the screen and a case with the keyboard -
WordStar
WordStar is a word processor application, published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS, that enjoyed a dominant market share during the early to mid-1980s. Although Seymour I. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program; starting with WordStar 4.0, the program was built on new code written principally by Peter Mierau. WordStar was a text-based word process -
Excel
Microsoft Excel (full name Microsoft Office Excel) is a spreadsheet program written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system and for Apple Macintosh computers. It features an intuitive interface and capable calculation and graphing tools which, along with aggressive marketing, have made Excel one of the most popular microcomputer applications to date. It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available for these platforms and has bee -
4th Generation Computers
After 1971 the fourth generation computers were built. The fourth generation computers were the extension of third generation technology. The fourth generation computers emerged with development of the VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration).With the help of VLSI technology microprocessor came into existence. The computers were designed by using microprocessor, as thousands of integrated circuits were built onto a single silicon chip. -
Steve Jobs
inventor who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he is widely recognized as a charismatic and design-driven pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields, transforming "one industry after another, from computers and smartphones to music and movies -
Osburne Computer
considered the first truely portable computer, weighed 24.5 Ibs and sold at the price of $1,795 -
Visicalc
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet computer program, originally released for the Apple II. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool, and is considered the Apple II's killer app. VisiCalc sold over 700,000 copies in six years, and as many as 1 million copies over its history.
VisiCalc was ported to numerous platforms, both 8-bit and some of the early 16-bit systems. In order to do this, the company dev -
PageMaker
PageMaker was one of the first desktop publishing programs, introduced in 1985 by Aldus,[2] initially for the then-new Apple Macintosh and in 1987 for PCs running Windows 1.0. As an application relying on a graphical user interface, PageMaker helped to popularize the Macintosh platform and the Windows environment. -
Mosaic
a user-friendly browser application that integrated graphics and point-and-click simplicity to make it easier for nontechnical people to navigate the Web. Mosaic was a huge success. NCSA made it available free of charge over the Internet, and more than two million copies were downloaded within a year. -
Netscape
Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is a U.S. computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters was in California.
Netscape's web browser was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of that share to Internet Explorer during the first browser war. The usage share of Netscape had fallen from over 90 percent in t
