A Brief History of the Computer

Computers and computer applications are on almost every aspect of our daily lives.
As like many ordinary objects around us, we may need clearer understanding of what
they are. You may ask "What is a computer?" or "What is a software", or "What is a
programming language?" First, let's examine the history.

1. The history of computers starts out about 2000 years ago

in Babylonia (Mesopotamia), at the birth of the abacus, a wooden rack holding
two horizontal wires with beads strung on them. 

2. Blaise Pascal is usually credited for building the first digital computer in 1642.
It added numbers entered with dials and was made to help his father, a tax
collector.
The basic principle of his calculator is still used today in
water meters and modern-day odometers. Instead of having
a carriage wheel turn the gear, he made each ten-teeth
wheel accessible to be turned directly by a person's hand
(later inventors added keys and a crank), with the result
that when the wheels were turned in the proper sequences,
a series of numbers was entered and a cumulative sum was
obtained. The gear train supplied a mechanical answer
equal to the answer that is obtained by using arithmetic. 

 
This first mechanical calculator, called the Pascaline, had several
 disadvantages. Although it did offer a substantial improvement over manual
calculations, only Pascal himself could repair the device and it cost more than
the people it replaced! In addition, the first signs of technophobia emerged with
mathematicians fearing the loss of their jobs due to progress.

3. A step towards automated computing was the development of punched cards,

which were first successfully used with computers in 1890 by Herman
Hollerith and James Powers, who worked for the US. Census Bureau. They
developed devices that could read the information that had been punched into
the cards automatically, without human help. Because of this, reading errors
were reduced dramatically, work flow increased, and, most importantly, stacks
of punched cards could be used as easily accessible memory of almost
unlimited size. Furthermore, different problems could be stored on different
stacks of cards and accessed when needed.

4. These advantages were seen by commercial companies and soon led to the
development of improved punch-card using computers created by International
Business Machines (IBM), Remington (yes, the same people that make
shavers), Burroughs, and other corporations. These computers used
electromechanical devices in which electrical power provided mechanical
motion -- like turning the wheels of an adding machine. Such systems included
features to:
o feed in a specified number of cards automatically
o add, multiply, and sort
o feed out cards with punched results
5. The start of World War II produced a large need for computer capacity,
especially for the military. New weapons were made for which trajectory tables
and other essential data were needed. In 1942, John P. Eckert, John W.
 Mauchly, and their associates at the Moore school of Electrical Engineering of
University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high - speed electronic computer
to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC (Electrical Numerical
Integrator And Calculator) 

Two men (in uniform) being trained to maintain

the ENIAC computer. The two women in the
photo were programmers. The ENIAC occupied
the entire thirty by fifty feet room.

6. The size of ENIAC’s numerical "word" was 10 decimal digits, and it could
multiply two of these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value
of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was
therefore about 1,000 times faster then the previous generation of relay
computers. ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of
floor space, and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. It had
punched card I/O, 1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using
decimal ring counters, which served as adders and also as quick-access (.0002
seconds) read-write register storage. The executable instructions making up a
program were embodied in the separate "units" of ENIAC, which were plugged
together to form a "route" for the flow of information.
7. Early in the 50’s two important engineering discoveries changed the image of
the electronic - computer field, from one of fast but unreliable hardware to an
image of relatively high reliability and even more capability. These discoveries
were the magnetic core memory and the Transistor - Circuit Element. 
These technical discoveries quickly found their way into new models of digital
computers. RAM capacities increased from 8,000 to 64,000 words in
commercially available machines by the 1960’s, with access times of 2 to 3 MS
(Milliseconds). These machines were very expensive to purchase or even to
rent and were particularly expensive to operate because of the cost of
expanding programming. Such computers were mostly found in large computer
centers operated by industry, government, and private laboratories - staffed
with many programmers and support personnel. This situation led to modes of
operation enabling the sharing of the high potential available.
 8. Many companies, such as Apple Computer and Radio Shack, introduced very
successful PC’s in the 1970's, encouraged in part by a fad in computer (video)
games. In the 1980's some friction occurred in the crowded PC field, with
Apple and IBM keeping strong. In the manufacturing of semiconductor chips,
the Intel and Motorola Corporations were very competitive into the 1980s,
although Japanese firms were making strong economic advances, especially in
the area of memory chips. By the late 1980s, some personal computers were
run by microprocessors that, handling 32 bits of data at a time, could process
about 4,000,000 instructions per second.

This page is compiled with contents from "A Short History of the Computer" by
Meyers, Jeremy. It's vailable at http://www.softlord.com/comp