A BRIEF HISTORY OF
COMPUTER
The computer as we know it
today had its beginning with a 19th century English mathematics professor name
Charles Babbage. He designed the Analytical Engine and it was this design that
the basic framework of the computers of today are based on.
First Computers
Eniac Computer
The first substantial
computer was the giant ENIAC machine
by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania.
ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator) used a word of 10
decimal digits instead of binary ones like previous automated
calculators/computers. ENIAC was also the first machine to use more than 2,000
vacuum tubes, using nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes. Storage of all those vacuum
tubes and the machinery required to keep the cool took up over 167 square
meters (1800 square feet) of floor space. Nonetheless, it had punched-card
input and output and arithmetically had 1 multiplier, 1 divider-square rooter,
and 20 adders employing decimal "ring counters," which served as
adders and also as quick-access (0.0002 seconds) read-write register storage.
The executable
instructions composing a program were embodied in the separate units of ENIAC,
which were plugged together to form a route through the machine for the flow of
computations. These connections had to be redone for each different problem,
together with presetting function tables and switches. This
"wire-your-own" instruction technique was inconvenient, and only with
some license could ENIAC be considered programmable; it was, however, efficient
in handling the particular programs for which it had been designed. ENIAC is
generally acknowledged to be the first successful high-speed electronic digital
computer (EDC) and was productively used from 1946 to 1955. A controversy
developed in 1971, however, over the patentability of ENIAC's basic digital
concepts, the claim being made that another U.S. physicist, John V. Atanasoff,
had already used the same ideas in a simpler vacuum-tube device he built in the
1930s while at Iowa State College. In 1973, the court found in favor of the
company using Atanasoff claim and Atanasoff received the acclaim he rightly
deserved.
Progression of Hardware
In the 1950's two devices would be invented that would improve the computer field and set in motion the beginning of the computer revolution. The first of these two devices was the transistor. Invented in 1947 by William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain of Bell Labs, the transistor was fated to oust the days of vacuum tubes in computers, radios, and other electronics.
Vacuum Tubes
The vacuum tube,
used up to this time in almost all the computers and calculating machines, had
been invented by American physicist Lee De Forest in 1906. The vacuum tube,
which is about the size of a human thumb, worked by using large amounts of electricity
to heat a filament inside the tube until it was cherry red. One result of
heating this filament up was the release of electrons into the tube, which
could be controlled by other elements within the tube. De Forest's original
device was a triode, which could control the flow of electrons to a positively
charged plate inside the tube. A zero could then be represented by the absence
of an electron current to the plate; the presence of a small but detectable
current to the plate represented a one.
Vacuum tubes
were highly inefficient, required a great deal of space, and needed to be
replaced often. Computers of the 1940s and 50s had 18,000 tubes in them and
housing all these tubes and cooling the rooms from the heat produced by 18,000
tubes was not cheap. The transistor promised to solve all of these problems and
it did so. Transistors, however, had their problems too. The main problem was
that transistors, like other electronic components, needed to be soldered
together. As a result, the more complex the circuits became, the more
complicated and numerous the connections between the individual transistors and
the likelihood of faulty wiring increased. Transistors
In 1958, this problem too was solved by Jack St. Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments. He manufactured the first integrated circuit or chip. A chip is really a collection of tiny transistors which are connected together when the transistor is manufactured. Thus, the need for soldering together large numbers of transistors was practically nullified; now only connections were needed to other electronic components. In addition to saving space, the speed of the machine was now increased since there was a diminished distance that the electrons had to follow.
Silicon Chip
Circuit Board
Mainframes to PCs
The 1960s saw large mainframe computers become much more common in large industries and with the US military and space program. IBM became the unquestioned market leader in selling these large, expensive, error-prone, and very hard to use machines.
A veritable
explosion of personal computers occurred in the early 1970s, starting with
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak exhibiting the first Apple II at the First West
Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. The Apple II boasted built-in BASIC
programming language, color graphics, and a 4100 character memory for only
$1298. Programs and data could be stored on an everyday audio-cassette
recorder. Before the end of the fair, Wozniak and Jobs had secured 300 orders
for the Apple II and from there Apple just took off.
Also introduced
in 1977 was the TRS-80. This was a home computer manufactured by Tandy Radio
Shack. In its second incarnation, the TRS-80 Model II, came complete with a
64,000 character memory and a disk drive to store programs and data on. At this
time, only Apple and TRS had machines with disk drives. With the introduction
of the disk drive, personal computer applications took off as a floppy disk was
a most convenient publishing medium for distribution of software.
IBM, which up to
this time had been producing mainframes and minicomputers for medium to
large-sized businesses, decided that it had to get into the act and started
working on the Acorn, which would later be called the IBM PC. The PC was the
first computer designed for the home market which would feature modular design
so that pieces could easily be added to the architecture. Most of the
components, surprisingly, came from outside of IBM, since building it with IBM
parts would have cost too much for the home computer market. When it was
introduced, the PC came with a 16,000 character memory, keyboard from an IBM
electric typewriter, and a connection for tape cassette player for $1265.
By 1984, Apple
and IBM had come out with new models. Apple released the first generation
Macintosh, which was the first computer to come with a graphical user
interface(GUI) and a mouse. The GUI made the machine much more attractive to
home computer users because it was easy to use. Sales of the Macintosh soared
like nothing ever seen before. IBM was hot on Apple's tail and released the
286-AT, which with applications like Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet, and Microsoft
Word, quickly became the favourite of business concerns.
That brings us up
to about ten years ago. Now people have their own personal graphics
workstations and powerful home computers. The average computer a person might
have in their home is more powerful by several orders of magnitude than a
machine like ENIAC. The computer revolution has been the fastest growing
technology in man's history.
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