Discover Computer History

How back does computer history go? Let's start with a few interesting things about the abacus. The abacus emerged about 5,000 years ago in Asia Minor and is still in use today. So it may be considered the first computer ever invented. This device allows users to make computations using a system of sliding beads arranged on a rack.

Early merchants used the abacus to keep trading transactions. But as the use of paper and pencil spread, particularly in Europe, the abacus lost its importance. It took nearly 12 centuries for the next significant advance in computing devices to emerge.

It was 1642. That year the 18-year-old son of a French tax collector, or the well known Blaise Pascal, invented what he called a numerical wheel calculator to help his father with his duties.

This Pascaline, or the brass rectangular box, used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Pascal's device used a base of ten to accomplish this. For example, as one dial moved ten notches, or one complete revolution, it moved the next dial - which represented the ten's column - one place. When the ten's dial moved one revolution, the dial representing the hundred's place moved one notch and so on.

The drawback to the Pascaline, of course, was its limitation to addition. And after that a lot of calculators were invented. Some were simpler some more sophisticated, but everything was moving further and further on.

The real beginnings of computers as we know them today lay with an English mathematics professor, Charles Babbage. He is well known also as "the father of computers".

Frustrated at the many errors he found while examining calculations for the Royal Astronomical Society, Babbage declared, "I wish to God these calculations had been performed by steam!" With those words, the automation of computers had begun.

By 1812, Babbage noticed a natural harmony between machines and mathematics: machines were best at performing tasks repeatedly without mistake; while mathematics, particularly the production of mathematic tables, often required the simple repetition of steps.

The problem centered on applying the ability of machines to the needs of mathematics. Babbage's first attempt at solving this problem was in 1822 when he proposed a machine to perform differential equations, called a Difference Engine.

Powered by steam and large as a locomotive, the machine would have a stored program and could perform calculations and print the results automatically.

After working on the Difference Engine for 10 years, Babbage was suddenly inspired to begin work on the first general-purpose computer, which he called the Analytical Engine. Babbage's assistant, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1842) and daughter of English poet Lord Byron, was instrumental in the machine's design.

Augusta Ada Kingwas one of the few people who understood the Engine's design as well as Babbage. She helped revise plans, secure funding from the British government, and communicate the specifics of the Analytical Engine to the public. Also, Lady Lovelace's fine understanding of the machine allowed her to create the instruction routines to be fed into the computer, making her the first female computer programmer.

And so, in the 1980's, the U.S. Defense Department named a programming language ADA in her honor.

You see, computer history was moving and it lead to the inventing of one of the first computers, similar to ours.

Since then, the computers have been getting stronger and stronger, but you will not be bored with long and difficult to read lectures of every next computer. You have already learnt about the first computers and you know how your computer looks.

Well, the most interesting part of the computer history began during the Second World War. With its onset governments sought to develop computers to exploit their potential strategic importance. By 1941 German engineer Konrad Zuse had developed a computer, the Z3, to design airplanes and missiles.

The Allied forces, however, made greater strides in developing powerful computers. In 1943, the British completed a secret code-breaking computer called Colossus to decode German messages. The Colossus's impact on the development of the computer industry was rather limited for two important reasons. First, Colossus was not a general-purpose computer; it was only designed to decode secret messages. Second, the existence of the machine was kept secret until decades after the war. So, it was quite a secret machine and no one, except the military, knew about it. But the American efforts produced a broader achievement. Howard H. Aiken (1900-1973), a Harvard engineer working with IBM, succeeded in producing an all-electronic calculator by 1944.

The purpose of the computer was to create ballistic charts for the U.S. Navy. It was about half as long as a football field and contained about 500 miles of wiring. Imagine your computer with these measurements! Impossible!

Another computer development spurred by the war was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), produced by both the U.S. government and the University of Pennsylvania. Consisting of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 5 million soldered joints, the computer was such a massive piece of machinery that it consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power, enough energy to dim the lights in an entire section of Philadelphia!!!

It was developed by John Presper Eckert (1919-1995) and John W. Mauchly (1907-1980). And it also was a general-purpose computer that computed at speeds 1,000 times faster than the previous computers! This was a great success in the computer history!

And our next stop in computer history is in the early 1960's. There were a number of commercially successful second generation computers used in business, universities, and government from companies such as Burroughs, Control Data, Honeywell, IBM, Sperry-Rand, and others. These second generation computers were also of solid state design, and contained transistors in place of vacuum tubes. They also contained all the components we associate with the modern day computer: printers, tape storage, disk storage, memory, operating systems, and stored programs.

One important example was the IBM 1401, which was universally accepted throughout industry, and is considered by many to be the Model T of the computer industry. By 1965, most large business routinely processed financial information using second generation computers...

And look what happened next!

In 1981, IBM introduced its personal computer (PC) for use in the home, office and schools. The 1980's saw an expansion in computer use in all three arenas as clones of the IBM PC made the personal computer even more affordable. The number of personal computers in use more than doubled from 2 million in 1981 to 5.5 million in 1982.

Ten years later, 65 million PCs were being used.

Computers continued their trend toward a smaller size, working their way down from desktop to laptop computers (which could fit inside a briefcase) to palmtop (able to fit inside a breast pocket).

In direct competition with IBM's PC was Apple's Macintosh line, introduced in 1984. Notable for its user-friendly design, the Macintosh offered an operating system that allowed users to move screen icons instead of typing instructions. Users controlled the screen cursor using a mouse, a device that mimicked the movement of one's hand on the computer screen.

And so, the computer history continues to evovle today. We all well know the computers nowadays. We are aware of the great usage and necessity of this amazing device.

For some of you the computer is a source of great amounts of information (or to be more precise -the internet), for others – a tool for doing their work, still others use it for gaming and so on and so on. And hopefully, you have learnt a few more things about the history of the computer, which may be helpful for you!