The first known use of the word "computer" was in

1613 in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by

English writer Richard Braithwait: "I haue read the
truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician
that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a
short number." It referred to a person who carried
out calculations, or computations. The word
continued with the same meaning until the middle of
the 20th century. From the end of the 19th century
the word began to take on its more familiar
meaning, a machine that carries out computations.
[3]
History

Main article: History of computing hardware

Pre-twentieth century

TheIshango bone
Devices have been used to aid computation for
thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one
correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting
device was probably a form of tally stick. Later
record keeping aids throughout the Fertile
Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.)

which represented counts of items, probably

livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay
containers.[4][5] The use of counting rods is one
example.

Suanpan (the number represented on this abacus

is 6,302,715,408)

The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks.

The Roman abacus was used in Babylonia as early as

2400 BC. Since then, many other forms of reckoning

boards or tables have been invented. In a medieval

European counting house, a checkered cloth would

be placed on a table, and markers moved around on

it according to certain rules, as an aid to calculating

sums of money.

The ancient Greek-designedAntikythera

mechanism, dating between 150 to 100 BC, is the

world's oldest analog computer.

The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the
earliest mechanical analog "computer", according
to Derek J. de Solla Price.[6] It was designed to
calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in
1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island
of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has
been dated to circa 100 BC. Devices of a level of

complexity comparable to that of the Antikythera

mechanism would not reappear until a thousand
years later.
Many mechanical aids to calculation and
measurement were constructed for astronomical and
navigation use. The planisphere was a star
chart invented by Ab Rayhn al-Brn in the early
11th century.[7] The astrolabe was invented in
the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd
centuries BC and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A
combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the
astrolabe was effectively an analog computer
capable of working out several different kinds of
problems in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe
incorporating a mechanical calendar computer[8]
[9] and gear-wheels was invented by Abi Bakr
of Isfahan, Persia in 1235.[10] Ab Rayhn alBrn invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar
calendar astrolabe,[11] an early fixedwired knowledge processing machine[12] with a gear
train and gear-wheels,[13] circa 1000 AD.

The sector, a calculating instrument used for solving

problems in proportion, trigonometry, multiplication

and division, and for various functions, such as

squares and cube roots, was developed in the late

16th century and found application in gunnery,

surveying and navigation.

The planimeter was a manual instrument to

calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over

it with a mechanical linkage.

A slide rule

The slide rule was invented around 16201630,

shortly after the publication of the concept of

the logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog computer

for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule

development progressed, added scales provided

reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and

cube roots, as well as transcendental functions such

as logarithms and exponentials, circular and

hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions.

Aviation is one of the few fields where slide rules are

still in widespread use, particularly for solving time

distance problems in light aircraft. To save space and

for ease of reading, these are typically circular

devices rather than the classic linear slide rule

shape. A popular example is the E6B.

In the 1770s Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss watchmaker,
built a mechanical doll (automata) that could write
holding a quill pen. By switching the number and
order of its internal wheels different letters, and
hence different messages, could be produced. In
effect, it could be mechanically "programmed" to
read instructions. Along with two other complex
machines, the doll is at the Muse d'Art et d'Histoire
of Neuchtel, Switzerland, and still operates.[14]

The tide-predicting machine invented by Sir William

Thomson in 1872 was of great utility to navigation in

shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires

to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a

set period at a particular location.

The differential analyser, a mechanical analog
computer designed to solve differential

equations by integration, used wheel-and-disc

mechanisms to perform the integration. In 1876 Lord
Kelvin had already discussed the possible
construction of such calculators, but he had been
stymied by the limited output torque of the ball-anddisk integrators.[15] In a differential analyzer, the
output of one integrator drove the input of the next
integrator, or a graphing output. The torque
amplifier was the advance that allowed these
machines to work. Starting in the 1920s, Vannevar
Bush and others developed mechanical differential
analyzers.
First general-purpose computing device

A portion ofBabbage's Difference engine.

Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer
and polymath, originated the concept of a
programmable computer. Considered the "father of
the computer",[16] he conceptualized and invented
the first mechanical computer in the early 19th
century. After working on his revolutionary difference
engine, designed to aid in navigational calculations,

in 1833 he realized that a much more general

design, an Analytical Engine, was possible. The input
of programs and data was to be provided to the
machine via punched cards, a method being used at
the time to direct mechanical looms such as
the Jacquard loom. For output, the machine would
have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The
machine would also be able to punch numbers onto
cards to be read in later. The Engine incorporated
an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form
of conditional branching and loops, and
integrated memory, making it the first design for a
general-purpose computer that could be described in
modern terms as Turing-complete.[17][18]

The machine was about a century ahead of its time.

All the parts for his machine had to be made by

hand this was a major problem for a device with

thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was

dissolved with the decision of the British

Government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to

complete the analytical engine can be chiefly

attributed to difficulties not only of politics and

financing, but also to his desire to develop an

increasingly sophisticated computer and to move

ahead faster than anyone else could follow.

Nevertheless, his son, Henry Babbage, completed a

simplified version of the analytical engine's

computing unit (the mill) in 1888. He gave a

successful demonstration of its use in computing

tables in 1906.

Later Analog computers

Sir William Thomson's third tide-predicting machine

design, 187981
During the first half of the 20th century, many
scientific computing needs were met by increasingly
sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct
mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a
basis for computation. However, these were not
programmable and generally lacked the versatility
and accuracy of modern digital computers.[19]
The first modern analog computer was a tidepredicting machine, invented by Sir William
Thomson in 1872. The differential analyser, a
mechanical analog computer designed to solve
differential equations by integration using wheeland-disc mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876
by James Thomson, the brother of the more famous
Lord Kelvin.[15]

The art of mechanical analog computing reached its

zenith with the differential analyzer, built by H. L.

Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MIT starting in 1927.

This built on the mechanical integrators of James

Thomson and the torque amplifiers invented by H. W.

Nieman. A dozen of these devices were built before

their obsolescence became obvious.

By the 1950s the success of digital electronic

computers had spelled the end for most analog

computing machines, but analog computers remain

in use in some specialized applications such as

education (control systems) and aircraft (slide rule).

Digital computer development

The principle of the modern computer was first

described by mathematician and
pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who set
out the idea in his seminal 1936 paper,[20] On
Computable Numbers. Turing reformulated Kurt
Gdel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and
computation, replacing Gdel's universal arithmeticbased formal language with the formal and simple
hypothetical devices that became known as Turing
machines. He proved that some such machine would
be capable of performing any conceivable
mathematical computation if it were representable
as an algorithm. He went on to prove that there was
no solution to theEntscheidungsproblem by first
showing that the halting problem for Turing
machines is undecidable: in general, it is not
possible to decide algorithmically whether a given
Turing machine will ever halt.
He also introduced the notion of a 'Universal
Machine' (now known as a Universal Turing
machine), with the idea that such a machine could
perform the tasks of any other machine, or in other
words, it is provably capable of computing anything
that is computable by executing a program stored on
tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. Von
Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of
the modern computer was due to this paper.
[21] Turing machines are to this day a central object
of study in theory of computation. Except for the

limitations imposed by their finite memory stores,

modern computers are said to be Turing-complete,
which is to say, they have algorithm execution
capability equivalent to a universal Turing machine.

Electromechanical

By 1938 the United States Navy had developed an

electromechanical analog computer small enough to

use aboard a submarine. This was the Torpedo Data

Computer, which used trigonometry to solve the

problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target.

During World War II similar devices were developed

in other countries as well.

Replica of Zuse'sZ3, the first fully automatic, digital

(electromechanical) computer.
Early digital computers were electromechanical;
electric switches drove mechanical relays to perform
the calculation. These devices had a low operating
speed and were eventually superseded by much
faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum
tubes. The Z2, created by German engineer Konrad
Zuse in 1939, was one of the earliest examples of an
electromechanical relay computer.[22]
In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with
the Z3, the world's first
working electromechanical programmable, fully
automatic digital computer.[23][24] The Z3 was built
with 2000 relays, implementing a 22 bit word
length that operated at a clock frequency of about
510 Hz.[25] Program code was supplied on
punched film while data could be stored in 64 words
of memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was
quite similar to modern machines in some respects,
pioneering numerous advances such as floating
point numbers. Replacement of the hard-toimplement decimal system (used in Charles
Babbage's earlier design) by the

simpler binary system meant that Zuse's machines

were easier to build and potentially more reliable,
given the technologies available at that time.
[26] The Z3 was probably a complete Turing
machine.

Vacuum tubes and digital electronic circuits

Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their
mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, at
the same time that digital calculation replaced
analog. The engineer Tommy Flowers, working at
the Post Office Research Station in London in the
1930s, began to explore the possible use of
electronics for the telephone exchange.
Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went
into operation 5 years later, converting a portion of
the telephone exchange network into an electronic
data processing system, using thousands of vacuum
tubes.[19] In the US, John Vincent Atanasoff and
Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed
and tested the AtanasoffBerry Computer(ABC) in
1942,[27] the first "automatic electronic digital
computer".[28] This design was also all-electronic
and used about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors
fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory.
[29]

Colossus was the

first electronic

digitalprogrammablecomputing

device, and

was used to break German ciphers during World War

II.
During World War II, the British at Bletchley
Park achieved a number of successes at breaking
encrypted German military communications. The
German encryption machine, Enigma, was first
attacked with the help of the electromechanical bombes. To crack the more sophisticated
German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine, used for highlevel Army communications, Max Newman and his
colleagues commissioned Flowers to build
the Colossus.[29] He spent eleven months from early
February 1943 designing and building the first
Colossus.[30] After a functional test in December
1943, Colossus was shipped to Bletchley Park, where
it was delivered on 18 January 1944[31] and
attacked its first message on 5 February.[29]
Colossus was the world's
first electronic digital programmable computer.[19] It
used a large number of valves (vacuum tubes). It
had paper-tape input and was capable of being
configured to perform a variety of boolean
logical operations on its data, but it was not Turing-

complete. Nine Mk II Colossi were built (The Mk I was

converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total).
Colossus Mark I contained 1500 thermionic valves
(tubes), but Mark II with 2400 valves, was both 5
times faster and simpler to operate than Mark 1,
greatly speeding the decoding process.[32][33]

ENIAC was the first Turing-complete device, and

performed ballistics trajectory calculations for

theUnited States Army.

The US-built ENIAC[34] (Electronic Numerical Integrator
and Computer) was the first electronic
programmable computer built in the US. Although
the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus it was much
faster and more flexible. It was unambiguously a
Turing-complete device and could compute any
problem that would fit into its memory. Like the
Colossus,