HISTORY OF COMPUTERS
Today, it's hard to imagine life without computers. They help us with every part of our lives — whether it's writing a paper for school or buying a candy bar at the corner store. But it took thousands of years for humankind to develop the sophisticated machines we take for granted these days.
ABACUS - 2600 BC
• Calculations are performed by placing the abacus flat and moving the beads with the fingers of one hand. • Each bead in the upper deck has a value of five; each bead in the lower deck has a value of one.
• Beads are considered counted, when moved towards the beam that separates the two decks.
ABACUS - TODAY
• The abacus is still in use today by shopkeepers in Asia and "Chinatowns" in North America. The use of the abacus is still taught in Asian schools. • Blind children are taught to use the abacus where other sighted children would use paper and pencil to perform calculations.
NAPIER’S BONES - 1612
• Around 1600 John Napier, a Scottish mathematician, invented logarithms and also prepared a convenient multiplication table on pieces of wood or bone. "Napier's bones," as they were called, had no practical value but his logarithms did.
ADDING MACHINE - 1642
• Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical adding machine at the age of 21 for his father, a tax collector. • The adding machine was capable of carrying tens automatically.
SLIDE RULE - 1650
• The Slide Rule was the result of a joint effort of two Englishmen Edmund Gunter and the reverend William Oughtred.
• The slide rule was based on Napier's logarithms and was to become the first analog computer since multiplication and subtraction were figured out.
ANALYTICAL ENGINE - 1834
For basic elements are considered here: - Input unit - The ALU or Algorithmic Unit - Central controller - Output unit
TABULATING MACHINE - 1890
• Herman Hollerith invented and developed a punch-card tabulation machine system.
• He developed a hand-fed 'press' that sensed the holes in punched cards; a wire would pass through the holes into a cup of mercury beneath the card closing the electrical circuit.
• Using the Tabulating Machine to tally the official 1890 population count, cost $5 million below the forecasts and saved more than two years' time.
TABULATING MACHINE - 1890
ANALOG COMPUTER - 1937
• American scientist Vannevar Bush constructs the first analog computer called the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer at MIT. • A one-hundred-ton machine with 2000 vacuum tubes and 150 motors.
ELECTRONIC COMPUTER 1937
Physicist John V. Atansaoff begins construction on what was to be the first electronic computer, the ABC, or Atanasoff-Berry Calculator. The ABC computer introduced the ideas of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, and logic circuits.
FIRST BINARY COMPUTERS - 1938
• Konrad Zuse (Germany) constructs the Z1 in his bedroom. The machine becomes so large that it occupies his parent's living room as well. He introduces keyboard entry, binary operations, light displays for output, and the use of electromagnetic relays for storing values.
FIRST VACUUM TUBE COMPUTER - 1943
A.W. Turing designs “Colossis,” the world’s first vacuum tube computer, to crack German military codes.
HARVARD MARK I - 1944
Howard Aiken and George Stibitz build the “Harvard Mark I,” a computer that gets data from punched cards, makes calculations with the aid of mechanical devices, and punches the results into a new set of cards --all from a stored program that controls its actions.
ENIAC
• In 1946, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly, and their fellow students at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering decided to start work on a “high speed electronic computer. “The Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator” (ENIAC). • It had 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 6000 switches. • This was the beginning of the first generation computers.
ENIAC
TRANSISTOR - 1956
In the AT&T - Bell laboratory the transistor is invented by three Americans: Walter H. Brattain, William Shockley and John Bardeen. This earns them a noble prize in 1956. The transistor begins the second generation of computers.
INTEGRATED CIRCUITS 1965
• The Integrated Circuits replaced the transistors which took up a lot of space. • Computers were replaced with small boards that reduced the size of computers drastically and make them more reliable, and less expensive. • Circuits are built into a substance called silicon.
MICROPROCESSOR - 1971
• In November 1971, Intel introduced the world's first commercial microprocessor, the 4004, invented by three Intel engineers.
FIRST PERSONAL COMPUTER - 1975
• Bill Gates & Paul Allen introduce the Altair 8800. Profits from this computer created Microsoft. • The MIT Altair 8800, the first personal computer, comes to the market as a kit to be assembled by hobbyists for $397. • The Altair has a memory capacity of 256 bytes, no monitor, keyboard, or mouse.
COMPUTER GRAPHICS - 1975
Computer display systems evolve from being able to display only single-color text character to being able to show lines, shapes, and even photographs in a wide variety of colors and sizes.
LAPTOP - 1983
The first laptop computer that is lightweight (about 4 pounds) and battery-operated is introduced.
LASER PRINTERS - 1985
First “personal” laser printers come to market, initiating the desktop publishing industry.
THE END