HISTORY OF

COMPUTER

What is Computer

A programmable machine that must work on two principals

1

It responds to a specific set of instructions

or ideas in mind and

2

can execute all data or parameters

and produce end result.

The first computer was

human mind

who has produce the idea of compute,

brain is first computer

machines inventions

are later.

The history of computers starts out about 2000 years ago, at the birth of the abacus, a wooden rack, holding two horizontal portions with beads strung on them.

Compute actions can be achieved when these beads are moved around according to programming rules memorized by the user.

With the use of abacus all regular arithmetic problems can be done.

Abacus Abacus is first step in computer history, it is the table (Counting board),

The Chinese abacus practical working since 1200.

The abacus was one of the earliest counting methods in Asia and parts of Europe.

It is still used today for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing mostly in China and East-Asia.

Pascaline Blaise Pascal was the French scientist one of the most reputed mathematician and physicist of his time. He has invented an early calculator

Pascal invented first digital computer (using digits) Pascaline in 1642. It added numbers entered with dials and was made to help his father in tax collection.

Leibniz Calculator

In 1671, Gottfried Wilhelm von invented a special stepped gear mechanism for automatic calculation into the business marketplace day and named it Leibniz calculator.

Leibniz Calculator had the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide using wheels placed at right angles which could be displaced by a special stepping mechanism, it could perform rapid multiplication or division. Likewise Pascaline, the Leibniz Calculator required operator for device who understand how to turn the wheels (Programmng Lanaguage) of the calculator.

Jackuard LoomIn 1804, French silk weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard invented the Jacquard Loom that simplifies complex designs & calculations .

In his loom a series connected Jacuard cards (Punched cards) were passed over needles pressed against the card. Whenever a hole came up the needle would go through the hole activating the threading mechanism and perform an action at end.

The Jacquard cards were later modified and evolved into computing punch cards.

Arithmometer

Charles Xavior Thomas of France created the first successful mechanical calculator recognized as Arithmometer in 1820 that could add, subtract, multiply and divide.

Arithmometer was improved version of earlier inventions.

Arithmometer was the first truly successful desktop calculator commercially sold and distributed.

Difference Engine

Charles Babbage, a mathematics professor at Cambridge University had realized in 1812 that long calculations needed to make mathematical tables, series and repeatable actions based engine

Babbage developed the Difference Engine in 1823 , powered by steam, the Difference Engine was designed to aid the calculation of mathematical, celestial and navigational tables

In order to perform a different calculation, the gears would have to be changed.

Analytical EngineAfter Difference Engine, now Babbage want to develop an Analytical Engine, which can perform decimal compute on 50 digits or words and having a storage capacity (memory) of 1,000 digits.

Babbage's invented an Analytical Engine in 1833 and soon able to use with punched cards which would be read into the machine from several different reading stations.

The machine was supposed to operate automatically, by steam power, and require only one person there. These punch cards were the first true version of a program, as they could be loaded and unloaded from the machine to quickly change from one calculation to another.

Babbage inventions are strong base for computing and he is considered as the "Father of Computing".

Herman Hollrith – Tabulation MachineIn 1881, Herman Hollrith began designing a machine to tabulate census data more efficiently than by traditional hand methods for U.S. Census Bureau.

Herman Hollrith invented and used a punched card device to help analyze the 1890 US census data.

Hollerith's punch cards and tabulating machines were a step toward automated computation as that can perform tabulation, sorting, calculation and general arithmetic operations. His machines were used for the 1890 census and performed core role in tabulating data, In 1896, Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company later the Company became part of IBM in 1924.

Z1 computer Konrad Zuse was a engineer in Aircraft Company in Germany is the inventor of the modern computer for automatic calculators. In 1936 he invented Z1 computer to help in lengthy engineering calculations.

One of the most difficult aspects of doing a large calculation with either a slide rule or a mechanical adding machine is keeping track of all intermediate results and using them, in their proper place, in later steps of the calculation.

Konrad Zuse wanted to overcome that difficulty. He realized that an automatic-calculator device would require three basic elements: a control, a memory, and a calculator.

ABC Computer

Professor John Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry built the electronic-digital computer at Iowa State University in 1942.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer represented several innovations in computing, including a binary system of arithmetic, parallel processing, regenerative memory, and a separation of memory and computing functions.

Mark I

Mark I, developed at Harvard University was the first large-scale Automatic Digital Computer It was considered by some to be the first universal calculator Howard Aiken built at IBM in 1944.

It began computations for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships navigation.

The main advantage of the Mark I was that it was fully automatic and do not requires human intervention once it started.

It is considered to be the beginning of the era of the modern computer.

ENIAC

ENIAC Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) was developed by John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert in 1946 by the US Government to fill the increasing need for computer capacity to calculate long tables and other essential data.

The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet (167 square meters) of floor space, weighed 30 tons, consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power .

In one second, the ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions. The use of vacuum tubes instead of switches and relays created the increase in speed.

The executable instructions making up a program in the separate units of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a sequence for the flow of information.

In use from 1946 to 1955, the ENIAC is commonly accepted as the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer (EDC).

Mark IIThe Harvard Mark II was an electromechanical computer built at Harvard University and was finished in 1947. It was financed by the US Navy.

The Mark II was constructed with high-speed electromagnetic relays instead of electro-mechanical counters used in the Mark I, making it much faster than its predecessor.

Its addition time was 125,000 microseconds and the multiplication time was 750,000 microseconds and more faster than Mark I.

It uses floating-point hardware. A unique feature of the Mark II is that it had built-in hardware for several functions such as the reciprocal, square root, logarithm, exponential, and some trigonometric functions. These took between five and twelve seconds to execute.

TransistorTransistor is not a computer, but this invention greatly affected the history of computers.

John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain, scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, were researching the behavior of crystals (germanium) as semi-conductors in an attempt to replace vacuum tubes, transister invented in 1947, it is great achievment in computer and electronics history.

The vacuum tube, used to amplify music and voice, made long-distance calling practical, but the tubes consumed power, created heat and burned out rapidly, requiring high maintenance.

Before transistors, circuits were composed of vacuum tubes.

UNIVAC

UNIVACUniversal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) was a computer milestone achieved by Dr. Presper Eckert and Dr. John Mauchly, the team that invented the ENIAC computer

UNIVAC in 1951 using cathode ray tube, paper tape, magnetic tape technology based on 4,500 vacuum tubes, 14,800 diodes Floor space:3,100 square feet. , its memory size was 2048 16-digit words

The UNIVAC can add any calculation in 120 microseconds, multiply time of 1,800 microseconds and a divide time of 3,600 microseconds.

EDVAC

Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) was one of the earliest electronic computers, it was based on binary system and machine can store programe

EDVAC construction was proposed in August 1944, but Mark I was in market later Von Neumann designed EDVAC computer in 1952 and operated in Manchester University.

The computer had almost 6,000 vacuum tubes and 12,000 diodes and consumed 56 kW of power. It covered 490 square feet and weighed 7,850 kg. The operating personnel was thirty people for each eight-hour shift.

IBM 701 IBM invented its new model IBM-701 in 1953, it was the first commercially successful general-purpose computer.

IBM-701 had electrostatic storage tube memory, used magnetic tape to store information, and binary fixed-point, single address hardware. The speed of the 701 computers was limited by the speed of its memory; the processing units in the machines were about 10 times faster than the core memory. The 701 also led to the development of the programming language FORTRAN.

Thomas Johnson Watson named it defense calculator and contributed to United Nations.

FORTRANThe First Successful High Level Programming Language Invented by John Backus in 1954.

FORTRAN or FORmula TRANslation, the first high level programming language released commercially, in 1957.

It is still used today for programming scientific and mathematical applications. Fortran used in IBM-701 as a code interpreter and famous for Speedcoding.

John Backus wanted a programming language closer to human language, later on other high language programs include Ada, Algol, BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, LISP, Pascal, and Prolog are also developed.

ERMA & MICRElectronic Recording Method of Accounting computer processing system invented at Stanford Research Institute

The first bank industry computer MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) for reading banking system.

ERMA was first demonstrated to the public in 1955 and first tested on real banking accounts in the fall of 1956.

ERMA computer were built by General Electric (GE). Thirty-two units were delivered to the Bank of America in 1959 for full-time use as the bank's accounting computer.

Integrated Circuit (IC)The Integrated Circuit is called THE CHIP invented in 1958, IC contain thousands of transistors in its small compact

It is major invention after transistor because it can perform fast and reliable

The monolithic (formed from a single crystal) integrated circuit placed the previously separated transisters, resistors, capacitors and all the connecting wiring onto a single crystal (chip) made of semiconductor material.

Germanium and Silicon used as semiconductor material.

Mouse and Windows

Douglas Engelbart changed the way computers from specialized machinery that only be used for scientist, to a user-friendly tool.

He invented or contributed to several interactive, user-friendly devices, the computer mouse, basic version of windows OS and other media

In 1964, the first prototype computer mouse was made for graphics based windows.

ARPAnet

The Original Internet, being in year 1969 at deptt of Defence (DoD), it is grandfather of the Internet.

ARPAnet protected the flow of information between military installations by creating a network of geographically separated computers that could exchange information via a newly developed protocol (rule for how computers interact) called NCP (Network Control Protocol).

ARPA stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a branch of the military that developed top secret systems and weapons during the Cold War

Intel 1103

Intel-1103 was the World's First DRAM Chip. In 1970, the newly formed Intel company publicly released the 1103, the first DRAM (Dynamic RAM) chip with 1K bit size.

The first commercially available computer using the 1103 was the HP-9800 series.

Robert H. Dennard and his team were working on early field-effect transistors and integrated circuits and his intention to work on memory chips.

Dennard, developed Intel-1103 by simpler memory cell that used only a single transistor and a small capacitor. IBM and Dennard were granted a founder for DRAM in 1968.

Intel 4004

In 1971 world's first single chip microprocessor, the Intel-4004 invented by Intel engineers, it is world's first universal microprocessor.

In the late 1960s, many scientists discussed the possibility of a processor on a chip, but nearly everyone felt that integrated circuit technology not support to this idea, but Ted Hoff felt differently; he was the first person to recognize that the new silicon-gated MOS technology might make a single-chip CPU (central processing unit) possible

Floppy Disk

In 1971, IBM introduced the first "memory disk", as it was called "floppy disk".

The first floppy was an 8-inch flexible plastic disk coated with magnetic iron oxide; computer data was written to and read from the disk's surface.

Floppy is a circle of magnetic material similar to other kinds of recording tape such as cassette tape; one or two sides of the disk are used for recording.

The first floppy could held 100 KBs of data.

IBM 5100

The first consumer computer came in market in early 1970s, the demand for IBM-5100 was increased because it could be used at home as well as in the office.

Altair PC based on Intel's 8008 microprocessor was called the Scelbi (SCientific, ELectronic and BIological) and used academic and industry applications.

Apple I & II

Following the introduction of the Altair , a boom in personal computers occurred, In 1975, Steve Wozniak was working for Hewlett Packard (calculator manufacturers) released the Apple I computer and started Apple Computers.

The Apple I was the first single circuit board computer. It came with a video interface, 8k of RAM and a keyboard. The system incorporated some economical components designed by Rockwell using MOS Technologies and Dynamic RAM.

IBM PC

In July of 1980, IBM and Microsoft talk about developing an OS for IBM's new personal computer.

For this purpose the secret plans were referred to as "Project Chess". The code name for the new computer was "Acorn".

finally in 1981, IBM released their new computer, re-named the IBM PC.

MS DOS

On August 12, 1981, IBM introduced its new revolution in a box PC with brand new operating system from Microsoft and a 16-bit computer operating system called MS-DOS version 1.0

Disk based OS made very attraction and help to work in PC, Microsoft had already produced several versions of programmes and packages for different computer system but Gates was more than happy on the creation DOS version for IBM.

Apple Lisa

Graphical User Interface was a technology which enable user to look at your computer screen, the GUI provides you with windows, pull-down menus, clickable buttons, scroll bars, icons, images and the mouse or pointer.

The first user interfaces to computers were not graphical or visually oriented; they were all text and keyboard commands. MS-DOS is an example of a text and keyboard method of computer control that you can still find on many PCs today.

GUI was developed by the Xerox Corporation in the 1970s, but it was not until the 1980s when GUIs became widespread and popular.

Apple Lisa was the first personal computer to use a GUI. Other innovative features were drop-down menu bar, windows, multiple tasking, a hierarchal file system, the ability to copy and paste, icons, folders and a mouse.

Apple Macintosh

In 1984 Apple designed Apple Macintosh a television like commercial PC.

It is high approach in Apple inventions, GUI based Apple Macintosh being used in general market applications, banking and accounting schemes, acedmic and research areas.

Apple Macintosh has introduced the advanced features of Apple Lisa’s drop-down menu bar, windows, multiple tasking and other extra

MS Windows

In 1983, Microsoft Corporation formally announced Microsoft Windows, a next-generation operating system that would provide a graphical user interface (GUI) and a multitasking environment for IBM computers.

Microsoft realized how profitable a successful GUI for IBM computers would be. He had seen Apple's Lisa computer and later the more successful Macintosh or Mac computer, Both Apple computer came with a stunning graphical user interface, therefore he invested to work in other versions of Windows.

W W W

Before 1990 there was no concept of public internet,

ARPAnet made realized on the idea to distribute information between geographically dispersed computers, for this purpose ARPAnet created the TCP/IP communications standard, which defines data transfer on the Internet today, finally it launched www protocol in 1990.

With the help of www PCs could be able to share the information, data and other material at the distance.