History of Computers
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Originated as Calculating Machines
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Abacus – Babylonians 3000 B.C.
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Napier's Bone
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John Napier (1617 )
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Multiplication and Division
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Slide Rule
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William Oughtred in England in 1632
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Logarithm, roots
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Most common before the the development of digital computers.
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Until 1960s
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Mechanical calculators
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Schickard's Clock
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German professor Wilhelm Schickard (1623)
Pascaline
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Blaise Pascal (1642)
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Punched card
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Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard (1801)
Difference Engine
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English mathematician
Charles Babbage (1822)
Steam driven
Polynomial , logarithmic ,
trigonometric functions
Never functional
Analytic Engine
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1837
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Powered by 6 stem engines
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General purpose computer
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Programmable and data stored
using Punched card technology of
Jacquard Loom.
Storage Unit called 'Store' and
processing unit 'Mill'.
Correspond to modern day CPU
and memory concept.
Conditional statement (different
from calculator)
Mark I
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Harvard University and IBM (1944)
First fully automated digital
computer
Not purely electronic
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Switches, rotating shafts,
clutches
hundreds of miles of wire, 16 m in
length, 2.4 m in height, It had a
weight of about 10,000 pounds
(4500 kg).
Operated on numbers 23 digits
wide.
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add or subtract two of these
numbers inn 3/10 th of a
second,
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multiply them in 4s, and divide
them in 10 seconds.
ABC computer
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Earliest attempts to build an allelectronic (no mechanical parts)
digital computer in 1937 by J. V.
Atanasoff and Clifford Berry.
By 1941 they build a machine
that could solve 29 simultaneous
equations with 29 unknowns.
First to store data as a charge
on a capacitor memory
(same mechanism as DRAM).
Used binary arithmetic
ENIAC
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Was the first general purpose
electronic computer
Ability of being reprogrammed for
different problems
University of Pennsylvania between
1943 and 1945 by two professors,
John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
Got funding from the war department to
compute table for artillery gun
positions and was used in the
calculation for hydrogen bombs.
filled a 20 X 40 ft room, weighed 30
tons, and used more than 18,000
vacuum tubes.
Could only hold 20 numbers at a time.
Faster than the Mark I: a multiplication
that required 6 seconds on the Mark I
could be performed on ENIAC in 2.8
thousandths of a second.
Commercial Computers
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Mauchly and Eckert set up their own company which produced the first commercial
computer the UNIVAC
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(Universal Automatic Computer)
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By 1955 IBM was selling more computers than UNIVAC
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IBM model 650 is one of the first widely used computers.
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In 1957 IBM 305 used magnetic disk for the storage (tapes were used prior to that)
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1959 IBM introduced two desk-sized computers IBM 1401 for business and IBM
1620 for scientist.
The invention of transistors (which replaced vacuum tubes) and Integrated Circuit
(Texas Instruments) enabled the shrink in the size of computers
Programming languages
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By 1959 more than 200 programming languages were
created.
1960 COBOL, - Grace hopper.
1965 John Kemeny of Dartmouth - BASIC programming
language
Microcomputers
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By 1964 – 18,000 computers
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1970 – Large scale integration
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Enabled the fabrication of large number of circuits in a single chip
I971 Microprocessors (uP) was invented in Intel
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A microprocessor (uP) is a processing unit that is fabricated on an
integrated circuit (IC) or a chip.
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Intel was the first to succeed in cramming an entire processing unit
on a single chip (IC).
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The Intel 4004 was first such chip
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In 1975 MITS Inc. produced
the first microcomputer, the
Altair using Intel 8080.
It was sold for less than $400.
Used Altair BASIC from
Microsoft
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Developed by Bill Gates
and Paul Allen
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1976 Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak build the first Apple
Computer
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Hand built
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Apple II (1977)
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First successfully massproduced micro computers
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1980 – IBM offered microsoft to build operating
system.
Microsoft developed MS-DOS
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IBM PC became the largest share in market for PCs
by 1981.
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Helped the tremendous growth of microsoft
1984 Apple - Macintosh computer with
Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a mouse.
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1992 – microsoft released Windows 3.1
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3,000,000 copies sold in 2 months
1993 several companies introduced computers by
using Pentium processors.
1990s – 2000s
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Yahoo, Amazon, ebay, were established.
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Java programming language was developed by Sun
Microsystems
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Google was founded in 1998
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2003 – myspace.com
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2004 - facebook.com
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2005 – youtube.com
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2004 Apple sleek iMac G5. System
unit housed inside the display box.
2006 Intel - Core 2 duo processors
family
2006 IBM – fastest supercomputer
Blue Gene. 28 trillion calculations
in 1 / 10 th of a second