Early uses of technology, though somewhat primitive, were the foundations for more complex inventions. Computers became more widespread as people realized the value of digital computing. And as the race for the fastest computer intensified, smaller and faster computers and computer parts emerged. For these reasons, the computer is one of the best inventions society has collaborated on, and the product of that collaboration is one of the most important and influential components of our daily lives. Major and minor technological advances from 1100 BC to 1930 paved the way for computers as we know them presently. The earliest known form of a calculating device was the abacus. These bead-utilizing devices date back as early as 1100 BC, and are still used today. Some people consider these devices as digital calculators because an individual bead was either in one position or another, representing 1 and 0 in the binary system. The next significant advancement came in 1623, when a German astronomer and mathematician by the name of Wilhelm Schickard built what is considered the first mechanical calculator. This device was described in a letter to Schickard’s friend, Johannes Kepler, but, “…in 1624 he [Schickard] wrote again to explain that a machine he had commissioned to be built for Kepler was, apparently along with the prototype, destroyed in a fire.” Modern engineers were able to reconstruct Schickard’s “calculating clock”, as he called it, based on those letters he sent to Kepler. Almost 200 years later, in 1804-5, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French weaver, produced the Jacquard loom. The loom operated by “interpreting” punched cards, which controlled which threads to weave into a certain pattern. Today, the Jacquard loom is considered... ... middle of paper ... ...y released the world’s first successful, mass-produced microcomputer, the PDP-8. At a cost of $18,000, it cost a fifth of a small IBM 360 mainframe. Another revolutionary breakthrough came in 1971, when Intel released the world’s first microprocessor: the Intel 4004. The number 4,004 represented the number of transistors the chip replaced. This silicon chip was widely used in calculators. On the cover of the January 1971 edition of Popular Electronics, a computer kit called the Altair 8800 was featured. The computer ran on an Intel 8080 chip, an improved version of the 4004, and had a mere 256 bytes of memory, expandable to 64 kilobytes. “Within weeks of the computer’s debut, customers inundated the manufacturing company, MITS, with orders.” (web source) The new, smaller computers would pave the way for Personal Computers, or PCs, as we know them in the 21st century.
The “Blaise Pascaline,” as referred to in [3] would be considered today as an early version of a calculator. This project derived in part from helping out his father who had been promoted as a tax clerk, a job which required him to perform long calculations at work. Only one other mechanical device was known to add up figures before the Pascaline and that was known as the Schickard's calculating clock, created by German professor Wilhelm Schickard. Unlike Schickard device, Pascal’s calculator had a larger number of production and use despite the somewhat unreliability of the device. The device consisted of a wheel with eight movable parts for dialing and each part corresponding to a particular digit in a number. It worked by using gears and pins to add integers; addends were entered by hand and carriers from one column to the next were broadcast internally by falling weights lifted and dropped by the pins attached to the gears. It could even be manipulated to subtract, multiply and divide if one knew their way around the Pascaline. Subtraction was done by adding the nines complement version of the number being subtracted. Multiplication; accomplished by repeating additions and division performed by repeating subtractions. Balise Pascals went on to inspire directly inspired further work on calculating machines by other inventors such as Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel
Mark I. It was actually a electromechanical calculation. It is said that this was the first potentially computers. In 1951 Remington Rand’s came out with the UNIVAC it began
In 1989 the 25 Megahertz 486 processor was introduced by Intel. Apple also started shipping its Macintosh Portable computers.
A relatively new field of study, the first college degree program in a U.S. College didn't exist until 1971. The history of computers is much older, stretching back to the 17th century when computers were conceived as an idea to make simple math easier, using mechanical parts to calculate basic math instead of by hand, which produced a large amount of errors. An early contributor to computers, Blaise Pascal was an inventor who invented a mechanical calculator called the “Pascaline”, which was used as an aid for his father, who was a tax collector. The one-function Pascaline could only add, and couldn't be sold due to its high cost. The archaic calculator was an inspiration to many inventors, who added and improved to it over the centuries. One inventor, Gottfried Leibniz, improved on it by adding subtraction, multiplication and division functions.
In 1623, Wilhem Schicard, a college professor, developed the first mechanical calculator. It performed by itself, although a human had to enter the numbers. Later, a mathematician named Charles Babbage designed a general purpose calculator that was called an Analytical Engine. The concept of this computer was to modernize by having memory, processor and an output device. The information was on punch cards and allowed the user to define and enter programs.
In previous years, the first computers were mechanical, not electronic. One of the first computers ever made was the Difference Engine, designed by Charles Babbage. (Babbage, C, n.d.). The Difference Engine was able to calculate polynomials using the differences method. After the Difference Engine, Babbage began his work on an improved calculating engine, the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine used punch cards to operate, just like the Jacquard Loom. The Jacquard Loom used punch cards to control weaving that created interesting patterns in textiles. The punch cards were used in the Analytical Engine to define the input and the calculations to carry-out. The Analytical Engine had two major parts. The first part was the mill, which is similar to a modern day computer processing unit, or a CPU. The CPU is the brain of a modern day computer; it is what carries out modern day instructions inside a computer. The mill would execute what it received from the store. The second part was the store, which was the memory of the computer. “It was the world’s first general-purpose computer.” (Babbage, C, n.d.)....
The history of the modern computer age is a brief one. It has been about 50 years since the first operational computer was put into use: the MARK 1 in 1944 at Harvard and ENIAC in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. Early use of computers in education was primarily found in mathematics, science and engineering as a mathematical problem-solving tool, replacing the slide rule and thus permitting students to deal more directly with problems of a type and size most likely to be encountered in the real world.[6]
The history of computers is an amazing story filled with interesting statistics. “The first computer was invented by a man named Konrad Zuse. He was a German construction engineer, and he used the machine mainly for mathematic calculations and repetition” (Bellis, Inventors of Modern Computer). The invention shocked the world; it inspired people to start the development of computers. Soon after,
In 500 B.C. the abacus was first used by the Babylonians as an aid to simple arithmetic. In 1623 Wihelm Schickard (1592 - 1635) invented a "Calculating Clock". This mechanical machine could add and subtract up to 6 digit numbers, and warned of an overflow by ringing a bell. J. H. Mueller comes up with the idea of the "difference engine", in 1786. This calculator could tabulate values of a polynomial. Muellers attempt to raise funds fails and the project was forgotten. Scheutz and his son Edward produced a 3rd order difference engine with a printer in 1843 and their government agreed to fund their next project.
The first computer ever created was developed by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, two very smart individuals who at the time assisted to the University of Pennsylvania. The name given to this first computer was ENIAC, which stands for Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator. As its name suggested this device was only capable of preforming numerical operations, however, it was ahead of its time. The machine was fairly big; the equipment used to keep it cool and its vacuum tubes (used to amplify electric signals) took up to 1800 square feet of space. The ENIAC was not really programmable, but it was considered one of the first high-speed computers to ever be created.” ENIAC is generally acknowledged to be the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer (EDC) and was
The idea of what is now modern computing originates (more or less) in the late 1700’s with the birth of computing’s conceptual father, Charles Babbage. He was born in London on December 26, 1791, the day after Christmas. He excelled in the area of mathematics (algebra for the most part), acting as his own instructor. He found himself to have been far in intellectual advance of his peers and “mentors”. Upon attending Trinity College, Cambridge in 1811, he still remained at incredible superiority to his tutors. After founding several societies (i.e. Analytical Society, Astronomical Society or Royal Astronomical Society), he became interested in mathematical calculation machines. This ultimately became his life interest. He pursued the invention of a machine that could compile mathematical tables. This gave way to the design of the “Difference Engine”. It performed somewhat complex mathematical tasks using gears and belts, not quite the hardware integrated in todays machines. He eventually conceived the design of an “Analytical Engine” that would be able to make virtually any calculation (at least those considered in the time period) given the proper commands and instructions.
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.
All a computer is is something that calculates number. So these computers of the 1700’s were made from gears that worked together to make a answer. “In the nineteenth century, Englishman Charles Babbage designed a steam powered machine that could calculate square roots, cube roots and other exponential functions.” (1) The first computer was an abacus. “The Chinese abacus consists of a wooden frame divided into an upper and lower section.” (2) These are all computer that have been around 100’s of years.
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.
The first microprocessor was developed by a small company called Intel (Integrated Electronics) in the early 1970s. But it faced no consumer market so they decided to market the chipset as “general purpose” microprocessing system where digital logic chips would have been used. This idea was a success and the Intel team developed 4 bit microprocessor called the 4004.