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Short notes on the history of computers
Short notes on the history of computers
History and development of computers
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There is no noun with the ability to represent modern life other than computer. Whether the effect is negative or positive, computers control nearly every aspect of our everyday life. Computers have evolved from bearing the role of strictly computing to having the ability of completing unthinkable tasks.
Supermarket scanners calculate our grocery bill while keeping store inventory; computerized telephone switching centers play traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of communication untangled; and ATM’s let us conduct banking transactions form virtually anywhere in the world.
Around five thousand years ago in Asia , a simple machine called the
Abacus , bearing a system of sliding beads arranged on a rack such as ones found in a pool hall may be considered the first computer. Merchants used the Abacus to record their barter transactions. Its popularity began to fall when the use of paper and pencil spread particularly throughout Europe, its importance diminished.
Computers were looked at as a way to simplify large workloads into discreet tasks. The United States census of 1880 took seven years to tally. The fear of later censuses taking an even more absurd amount of time to count, the bureau turned to technology. An American inventor also applied the concept to computing. He fed cards storing data into a machine compiling the results instinctively. Punched holes in the cards would represent letters and number, a single hole depicted a number, while a combination of two holes portrayed a letter.
This allowed the census results in six weeks. Not only did the machine remarkably decrease the amount of time the census took, but also the cards used represented stored memory of the census and reduced computational errors. It found its way into the business world founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, which later became International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. After this point in history the evolution of the computer is began to become an increased desired area of interest.
The first major interest began with the onset of World War II. A German engineer developed a computer to design airplanes and missiles. The British were also in the race of enhancing computer technology. They completed a secret code-breaking computer used to decode German messages. The existence of the machine was not uncovered until decades after the war.
The first all-electronic calculator was design by a Harvard engineer in 1944 who was working with IBM. The calculator was about the size of one half a football field and consisted of 500 miles of writing. It was called the Harvard-IBM
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.
Henretta, James A., Robert O. Self, and Rebecca Edwards. America a Concise History. Vol. 1: To 1877. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2013. N. pag. Print. Pages 195, 196, 198-199
Walens, Susann. A. United States History Since 1877. Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT. September 2007.
Walker, Francis Amasa, U. S. Congress. House, U. S. Census Office, and U. S. Department of the Interior. "Ninth Census -- Volume Ii. The Vital Statistics of the United States, Embracing the Tables of Deaths, Births, Sex, and Age, to Which Are Added the Statistics of the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb, the Insane, and the Idiotic, Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior, by Francis A. Walker, Superintendent of Census." 1872.
Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs and Jon Gjerde. edit., Major Problems in American History: Volume 1 to 1877. Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.
What 1890 Census words motivate Turner’s essay? Why is this a significant “brief official statement”?
In 1886 Dorr D. Felt (1862 - 1930) invented the "comptometer". This was the first calculator where the operands are entered by just pressing keys. In 1889 in also invents the first printing desk calculator.
Mount, Steve. “Constitutional Topic: The Census.” USConstitution.net. 3 Jan. 2011. Web. 31 July 2011. .
Phillips, Charles. "December 29, 1890." American History 40.5 (2005): 16. MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. Web. 6 Apr. 2015.
Vincent, Grayson W. and Victoria Velkoff. 2010. “United States Census.” Census.Gov. Retrieved May 2014 (https://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/p25-1138.pdf).
In the year of 1944, IBM had perfected the the calculator it was known as Harvard
Computer engineering started about 5,000 years ago in China when they invented the abacus. The abacus is a manual calculator in which you move beads back and forth on rods to add or subtract. Other inventors of simple computers include Blaise Pascal who came up with the arithmetic machine for his father’s work. Also Charles Babbage produced the Analytical Engine, which combined math calculations from one problem and applied it to solve other complex problems. The Analytical Engine is similar to today’s computers.
The computer evolution has been an amazing one. There have been astonishing achievements in the computer industry, which dates back almost 2000 years. The earliest existence of the computer dates back to the first century, but the electronic computer has only been around for over a half-century. Throughout the last 40 years computers have changed drastically. They have greatly impacted the American lifestyle. A computer can be found in nearly every business and one out of every two households (Hall, 156). Our Society relies critically on computers for almost all of their daily operations and processes. Only once in a lifetime will a new invention like the computer come about.
Since the beginning of time, humans have thought and made many inventions. Repeatedly the newer one is better than the older. Our minds have created many remarkable things, however the best invention we ever created is the computer. computers are constantly growing and becoming better every day. Every day computers are capable of doing new things. Even though computers have helped us a lot in our daily lives, many jobs have been lost because of it, now the computer can do all of the things a man can do in seconds! Everything in the world relies on computers and if a universal threat happens in which all computers just malfunction then we are doomed. Computers need to be programmed to be able to work or else it would just be a useless chunk of metal. And we humans need tools to be able to live; we program the computer and it could do a lot of necessary functions that have to be done. It is like a mutual effect between us and he computer (s01821169 1).
It all started with the creation of The Abacus which is calculating device is invented 5 millennium in Asia and which is still being used until today, it’s known as the first computer. This device allows users to make calculations using sliding beads arranged in a rack form. Only after about 1200 years, next adv...
The history of the computer dates back all the way to the prehistoric times. The first step towards the development of the computer, the abacus, was developed in Babylonia in 500 B.C. and functioned as a simple counting tool. It was not until thousands of years later that the first calculator was produced. In 1623, the first mechanical calculator was invented by Wilhelm Schikard, the “Calculating Clock,” as it was often referred to as, “performed it’s operations by wheels, which worked similar to a car’s odometer” (Evolution, 1). Still, there had not yet been anything invented that could even be characterized as a computer. Finally, in 1625 the slide rule was created becoming “the first analog computer of the modern ages” (Evolution, 1). One of the biggest breakthroughs came from by Blaise Pascal in 1642, who invented a mechanical calculator whose main function was adding and subtracting numbers. Years later, Gottfried Leibnez improved Pascal’s model by allowing it to also perform such operations as multiplying, dividing, taking the square root.