History of Personal Computer

Ciurea Laurenţiu-Ionuţ
Grupa: 2102A
Today’s small, portable, wireless
and well-designed personal
computers seem to have nothing
in common with the large and
heavy machines that arose during
the World War II. Though those
couldn’t be called “personal” even
by a long stretch of the Today, hundreds of companies sell
imagination, that is where PC personal computers, accessories
history takes its place. and sophisticated software and
games, and PCs are used for a
wide range of functions from basic
word processing to editing photos
to managing budgets. At home
and at work, we use our PCs to do
almost everything. It is nearly
impossible to imagine modern life
without them
From the beginning

 While today we use computers for both work and play, the computer
was actually created for an entirely different purpose. In 1880, the
population of the United States had grown so large that it took seven
years to formulate the results of the U.S. Census.

 So, the government looked for a faster way to get the job done, which is
why punch-card computers were invented that took up an entire room.
Computers in the 1800s
 1801: In France, Joseph Marie Jacquard creates a loom that uses wooden
punch cards to automate the design of woven fabrics. Early computers
would use similar punch cards.

 1822: Thanks to funding from the English government, mathematician

Charles Babbage invents a steam-driven calculating machine that was
able to compute tables of numbers.

 1890: Inventor Herman Hollerith designs the punch card system to

calculate the 1880 U.S. census. It took him three years to create, and it
saved the government $5 million. He established a company that
become IBM.
A census clerk tabulates data using the Hollerith machine
Computers from 1900-1940s
 1936: Alan Turing presents the notion of a universal machine, later
called the Turing machine, capable of computing anything that is
computable. The central concept of the modern computer was based on
his ideas.
 1939: David Packard and Bill
Hewlett found their company
in a Palo Alto, California
garage. Their first product, the
HP 200A Audio Oscillator,
rapidly became a popular piece
of test equipment for
engineers. Walt Disney
Pictures ordered eight of the
200B model to test recording
equipment and speaker
systems for the 12 specially
equipped theatres that showed
the movie “Fantasia” in 1940. Hewlett and Packard in their garage workshop
The 1940s computer
 The earliest electronic computers were not “personal” in
any way. They were enormous and hugely expensive, and
they required a team of engineers and other specialists to
keep them running.
In 1941 professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University
J.V. Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry design a computer
that can solve 29 equations simultaneously. This is the first time a
computer is able to house data within its own memory.
That same year, German engineer Konrad Zuse creates the Z3
computer, which used 2,300 relays, performed floating-point binary
arithmetic, and had a 22-bit word length. This computer was
eventually destroyed in a bombing raid in Berlin in 1943.
 ENIAC
One of the first and most famous
of these, the Electronic Numerical
Integrator Analyzer and Computer
(ENIAC), was built at the
University of Pennsylvania to do
ballistics calculations for the U.S.
military during World War II.
ENIAC cost $500,000, weighed 30
tons and took up nearly 2,000
square feet of floor space. On the
outside, ENIAC was covered in a
tangle of cables, hundreds of
blinking lights and nearly 6,000
mechanical switches that its
operators used to tell it what to do.
On the inside, almost 18,000
vacuum tubes carried electrical
signals from one part of the
machine to another.
Postwar innovation
 ENIAC and other early computers proved to many universities and
corporations that the machines were worth an important investment of
money, space and manpower they demanded. 
 In 1948, Bell Labs introduced the transistor, an electronic device that
carried and amplified electrical current but was much smaller than the
vacuum tube.

Dec. 23, 1947:

Transistor Opens
Door to Digital
Future
 But one of the most significant of the inventions that paved the way for
the PC revolution was the microprocessor. Before microprocessors
were invented, computers needed a separate integrated-circuit chip for
each one of their functions. (This was one reason the machines were
still so large.)
 Microprocessors were the size of a thumbnail, and they could do things
the integrated-circuit chips could not: They could run the computer’s
programs, remember information and manage data all by themselves.
 The first microprocessor
on the market was
developed in 1971 by an
engineer at Intel named
Ted Hoff. Intel’s first
microprocessor, a 1/16-
by-1/8-inch chip called
the 4004, had the same
computing power as the
massive ENIAC.
 These innovations made it cheaper and easier to
manufacture computers than ever before. As a result the
“personal computer” was born.
• In 1974, a company called
Micro Instrumentation and
Telemetry Systems (MITS)
introduced a mail-order build-
it-yourself computer kit called
the Altair. The Altair was a
huge success; thousands of
people bought the $400 kit.

•However, it really did not do

much. It had no keyboard and
no screen, and its output was
just a bank of flashing lights..
 In 1975, MITS hired a pair of Harvard
students named Paul G. Allen and Bill Gates
to adapt the BASIC programming language
for the Altair. The software made the
computer easier to use, and it was a hit. In
April 1975 the two young programmers took
the money they made from “Altair BASIC”
and formed a company of their own—
Microsoft—that soon became an empire.
 The year after Gates and Allen started Microsoft, two engineers named
Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak built a homemade computer that
would change the world. This computer, called the Apple I, was more
sophisticated than the Altair: It had more memory, a cheaper
microprocessor and a monitor with a screen.
 In April 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II, which had a
keyboard and a color screen.
 1981: IBM releases their first personal computer, the Acorn, with an
Intel chip, two floppy disks, and an available color monitor.

• 1990: English programmer and physicist Tim Berners-Lee

develops HyperText Markup Language, also known as HTML. He
also prototyped the term WorldWideWeb. It features a server,
HTML, URLs, and the first browser.
1993: With an attempt to
enter the handheld
computer market, Apple
releases Newton. Called
the “Personal Data
Assistant”, it never
performed the way Apple
President John Scully had
hoped, and it was
discontinued in 1998.
1996: Sergey Brin and Larry Page develop Google at
Stanford University.
Today, laptops, smart phones and tablet computers
allow us to have a PC with us wherever we go.
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