Orientation

HISTORY OF COMPUTERS

Early people have been finding ways to help them in calculating and processing data. As a result of that they built many machines to get their tasks easy. Many of these machines were manual or mechanical.

The first man made calculating device was ABACUS. It was invited in asia.

 In 1617 a Scottish mathematician named John Napier invented a mathematical calculator called “Napier’s bones”. The 'bones' consist of a set of rectangular rods, each marked with a counting number at the top, and the multiples of that number down their lengths.

·         In 1642 a French mathematician named Blaise Pascal invented a calculating machine called “Pascaline”. He developed this machine to help father with his work as a Tax Receiver. This is considered as the world’s first calculator.

In 1822 Charles Babbage an English mathematician designed a calculating machine called “Difference Engine” to calculate mathematical tables. Difference engine consisted of cogs and levers, but was very complex. He even indicated that the machine should print out the results at the end on to paper tape. But technology of the time was not advanced enough to make the various parts accurately. So after spending a huge sum of money he gave up.

·         In 1834 Babbage wanted to design a better machine. So that he invented “Analatical Engine”that planned to drive by a steam Engine.It had all parts of a modern computer.

Therefore Charles Babbage considered as the Father of Computer.

·         Ada Augusta was a friend of Charles Babbage. She developed programming ideas for his machines. She is considered as the first computer programmer.

·         In 1880 Herman Hollerith invented a machine to do the counting faster. He called it the “Tabulating machine”. Tabulating (counting) machine used cards with holes punched in them.

·         Z3 was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine.

·         ASCC, which stands for Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was the first fully automatic computer capable of performing a sequence of calculations without any manual intervention.

·         Code breaking computer was the world's first programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices.

·         In 1937, Howard Aiken of Harvard University, designed the MARK 1, the first electromechanical calculator. Aiken's calculator was made from parts of seventy-eight accounting machines and desk calculators controlled by a roll of punched paper.  It weighed five tons, had five hundred miles of wire, and filled a fifty-by-thirty-foot room.

 

·         The Mark I was an electro-mechanical device that is a machine powered by an electric motor and uses switches and relays.

·         In 1945 ENIAC which stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator was developed. It was the first general-purpose electronic computer.

·         By the outbreak of World War II, several computers were under design and construction. The Harvard Mark I and the ENIAC are two of the more famous machines of the era.

·         Grace Murray Hopper worked at Harvard's Cruft Laboratories on the Mark series of computers. Admiral Hopper became the third person to program the Mark I. In pursuit of her vision she risked her career in 1949 to join the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and provide businesses with computers. There she began yet another pioneering effort of UNIVAC I, the first large-scale electronic digital computer

After 1951 the story becomes one of the ever-expanding use of computers to solve problems in all areas. From that point, the search has focused not only on building faster, bigger devices, but also on the development of tools to allow us to use these devices more productively. The history of computing hardware from this point on is categorized into several “generations” based on the technology they employed.

Computer Generations

 

The first Electronic computer.

In 1946,John Presper and John William Mauchly at university of Pennsylvania made the first electronic computer.

1^st Generation of computers

·        Commercial computers in the first generation were built using vacuum tubes to store information. vacuum tube was the basic building block of these machines.

 

·        Required very large, specially built rooms because these computers are very large machines.

·        Generate large heat. Therefore they required heavy-duty air-conditioning and frequent maintenance.

·        The primary memory device of this first generation of computers was a

Magnetic drum.

·        Speed of computers was very low.

·        Hungarian mathematician, John Von Neumann who was then working in America, made a major contribution to the development of these computers.

·        Ex:ENIAC.

 

2^nd Generation of computers

·        Basic building block was transistor.

·        The transistor was smaller, more reliable, faster, more durable, and cheaper.

·        The second generation used memory made from  magnetic cores, tiny doughnut-shaped devices, each capable of storing one bit of information.

·        The magnetic disk, a new auxiliary storage device, was also developed

during the second generation.

·        IBM had become main maker of computers in that generation.

3^rd Generation of computers

·        In 3^rd generation, the basic building block was , IC(integrated circuit).

·        IC's were complete electronic circuits contained on a wafer of silicon known as a chip. IC's solved the problem of heat dissipation within the circuit, and by 1969 it was possible to have more than 1, 000 transistors on a single chip.

·        Transistors also were used for memory construction. Each transistor

represented one bit of information.

  

·        Integrated-circuit technology allowed memory boards to be built using transistors.

·        Auxiliary storage devices were still needed because transistor memory was volatile; that is, the information went away when the power was turned off.

4^th Generation of computers

·        The basic building block was the microprocessor or chip.

·        The most remarkable invention of the 4^th generation is Personal Computer(PC).

·        Computers are speed, small in size and has many computing capabilities.

·        Microcomputers had become so cheap that almost anyone could have one.

·        The IBM PC was introduced in 1981 and soon was followed by compatible machines manufactured by many other companies.  

·        Things become easier with the development of languages like Fortran, BASIC and Cobol.