In The Evolution of Computers, we will get to know details on the History of computers and the Timeline according to the subsequent years. The computer is well-known to us, the first counting device our ancestors used in the early decades. But also before that, they utilized sticks, bones, and stones as their counting implements. As the evolution of the human mind and technology improved with time, the existence of more computing devices increased.
History of Computer
The computer we look at today has faced many steps and stages to be like this. With the development of computer, many devices were invented. Some of them are:
Abacus:
Abacus is the first device that allowed us to perform calculations. It was invented more than 5000 years ago. Probably of Babylonian origin, an abacus is a calculating instrument that uses beads that slide along a series of wires or rods set in a frame to represent the decimal places. It is the ancestor of the modern digital calculator.
Used by merchants in the Middle Ages throughout Europe and the Arabic world, it was gradually replaced by arithmetic based on Hindu-Arabic numerals. Though rarely used in Europe past the 18th century, it is still used in the Middle East, China, and Japan.
Difference Engine:
Difference Engine, an early calculating machine, verging on being the first computer, was designed and partially built during the 1820s and ’30s by Charles Babbage. Babbage was an English mathematician and inventor; he invented the cowcatcher, reformed the British postal system, and was a pioneer in the fields of operations research and actuarial science. It was Babbage who first suggested that the weather of years past could be read from tree rings. He also had a lifelong fascination with keys, ciphers, and mechanical dolls (automatons).
The Difference Engine was more than a simple calculator, however. It mechanized not just a single calculation but a whole series of calculations on a number of variables to solve a complex problem. It went far beyond calculators in other ways as well. Like modern computers, the Difference Engine had storage—that is, a place where data could be held temporarily for later processing—and it was designed to stamp its output into soft metal, which could later be used to produce a printing plate.
Nevertheless, the Difference Engine performed only one operation. The operator would set up all of its data registers with the original data, and then the single operation would be repeatedly applied to all of the registers, ultimately producing a solution. Still, in complexity and audacity of design, it dwarfed any calculating device then in existence
Pascal Adding Machine:
Pascaline, also called Arithmetic Machine, the first calculator or adding machine to be produced in any quantity and actually used. The Pascaline was designed and built by the French mathematician-philosopher Blaise Pascal between 1642 and 1644. It could only do addition and subtraction, with numbers being entered by manipulating its dials. Pascal invented the machine for his father, a tax collector, so it was the first business machine too (if one does not count the abacus). He built 50 of them over the next 10 years.
Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal invented an adding machine, the Pascaline.
“Use. The dials show the French monetary unit, the livre, which was divided into 12 deniers, each subdivided into 20 sols. The essential part of the machine was its decimal carry; each toothed wheel moved forward one unit (one-tenth of a revolution on each wheel except those of deniers and sols) when the previous wheel had completed one revolution. Subtraction was based on complementary numbers that could be revealed by moving the strip at the top of the calculator”
Leibniz Calculator:
It was improved upon Pascal’s Adding Machine. This is mainly made up of steel And Copper. In the year 1671, a scientist named Gottfried Leibniz generally modified the Pascal calculator, and he designed his own machine for performing various mathematical calculations which are based on multiplication and division as well.
It is also known as the Leibniz wheel or stepped reckoner. It is the type of machine which is used for calculating the engine of a class of mechanical calculators. The Leibniz calculator is also called a Leibniz wheel or stepped drum. Gottfried Leibniz designed a calculating machine which is called as Step Reckoner. Leibniz’s calculator is also known as the first true four-function calculator.
First Computer Design
In the 19th century, a renowned Mathematician Charles Babbage developed and partly built a Victorian-era computer named the Analytical Engine. The fundamental component of the oldest machine was the input, having the programs and data that the user had to provide to the Analytical Machine through punched cards, a technique being employed at the time to handle mechanical looms like the Jacquard loom. The creation of the design of the Analytical Engine; was initiated by the year 1833. Charles Babbage is known as the Father of Computer
The computer was born not for amusement or email but out of a requirement to solve a complicated number-crunching crisis. By 1880, the U.S. population had expanded so vastly; that it bore more than seven years to tabulate the U.S. Census consequences. The government pursued a more quick method to acquire the job done, offering an upgrade to the punch-card-based computers that grabbed up total room space.
ENIAC:
ENIAC, in full Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, built during World War II by the United States. American physicist John Mauchly, American engineer J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and their colleagues at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania led a government-funded project to build an all-electronic computer. Under contract to the army and under the direction of Herman Goldstine, work began in early 1943 on ENIAC. The next year, mathematician John von Neumann began frequent consultations with the group.
ENIAC was something less than the dream of a universal computer. Designed specifically for computing values for artillery range tables, it lacked some features that would have made it a more generally useful machine. It used plugboards for communicating instructions to the machine; this had the advantage that, once the instructions were thus “programmed,” the machine ran at electronic speed.
Instructions read from a card reader or other slow mechanical device would not have been able to keep up with the all-electronic ENIAC. The disadvantage was that it took days to rewire the machine for each new problem. This was such a liability that only with some generosity could it be called programmable.
UNIVAC:
The Universal Automatic Computer or UNIVAC was a computer milestone achieved by Dr. Presper Eckert and Dr. John Mauchly, the team that invented the ENIAC computer.
John Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, after leaving the academic environment of The Moore School of Engineering to start their own computer business, found their first client was the United States Census Bureau. The Bureau needed a new computer to deal with the exploding U.S. population (the beginning of the famous baby boom). In April 1946, a $300,000 deposit was given to Eckert and Mauchly for the research into a new computer called the UNIVAC.
- The UNIVAC had an add time of 120 microseconds, multiply time of 1,800 microseconds and a divide time of 3,600 microseconds.
- Input consisted of magnetic tape with a speed of 12,800 characters per second with a read-in speed of 100 inches per second, records at 20 characters per inch, records at 50 characters per inch, card to tape converter 240 cards per minute, 80 column punched card input 120 characters per inch, and punched paper tape to magnetic tape converter 200 characters a second.
- Output media/speed was magnetic tape/12,800 characters per second, uniprinter/10-11 characters per second, high-speed printer/600 lines per minute, tape to card converter/120 cards per minute, Rad Lab buffer storage/Hg 3,500 microsecond, or 60 words per minute.
Ancient Theory of Computer
Eventually, the notion of numerals became tangible and familiar adequately for counting to emerge, to instruct sequences to others. It led to the evolution of the numeral system and mathematical notation such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, squaring as the mathematical operations. All this led to the birth of the Calculator by the year 1642 by Blaise Pascal. Its name is Pascaline.
Timeline of Computer History
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1801 | In France, Joseph Marie Jacquard created a loom that renders punched wooden cards. |
| 1822 | English mathematician Charles Babbage developed a calculating device called the Analytical Engine, which computes number tables. |
| 1890 | Herman Hollerith devised a punch card system to compute the 1880 census, executing the task merely three years, preserving the government $5 million. |
| 1936 | Alan Turing proposed the concept of a universal machine, subsequently dubbed the Turing machine, competent in computing anything computable. |
| 1937 | J.V. Atanasoff, Physics and Mathematics Professor at Iowa State University, efforts to construct the first computer lacking shafts, gears, or belts. |
| 1941 | J.V. Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, invented the computer that could decrypt 29 equations simultaneously. |
| 1943-1944 | Pennsylvania Professors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert; designed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). |
| 1946 | After acquiring finance from the Census Bureau, Mauchly and Presper developed the UNIVAC, the first saleable computer. |
| 1953 | Grace Hopper developed the first computer language; ultimately became well-known as COBOL. Thomas Johnson Watson Jr., the son of IBM CEO Thomas Johnson Watson Sr., created the IBM 701 EDPM assisting the United Nations to hold invoices on Korea during the war. |
| 1958 | Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce reveal the integrated circuit, well-known as the computer chip. |
| 1964 | Douglas Engelbart reveals a prototype of the current computer, having a mouse and a Graphical User Interface (GUI). |
| 1970 | The newly initiated Intel reveals the Intel 1103, the first Dynamic Access Memory (DRAM) chip. |
| 1971 | Alan Shugart directs a team of IBM engineers who developed the floppy disk permitting data; shared among computers. |
| 1973 | Robert Metcalfe, a member of the research team for Xerox, developed an Ethernet, linking numerous computers and other hardware. |
| 1974-1977 | Many personal computers hit the demand, including IBM 5100, Scelbi& Mark-8 Altair, Radio Shack’s TRS-80. |
| 1976 | According to Stanford University, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak initiated Apple Computers, the first computer holding a single-circuit board. |
| 1981 | The first IBM personal computer, presented on 12 Aug 1981, operated the MS-DOS operating system. |
| 1986 | Compaq brought the Deskpro 386 to demand. Its 32-bit architecture furnishes a speed equivalent to mainframes. |
| 1990 | Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, originates HyperText Markup Language (HTML), offering elevation to the World Wide Web. |
| 2004 | Facebook, a social networking site, takes off. |
| 2005 | YouTube, a video-sharing service, was established. |
| 2007 | The iPhone fetches many computer functions to the smartphone. |
| 2009 | Microsoft released Windows 7, offering the capability to pin applications to the taskbar and writing recognition. |
| 2011 | Google launches the Chrome book, a laptop that operates the Google Chrome OS. |
| 2019 | Apple declared I Pad IOS for their tablet appliances in June. |
| 2020 | The Microsoft Internet Games service terminated for Windows 7 on 22 Jan. |
| 2021 | Apple launched the Apple Air Tag. |
Generation of Computer
The modern computer took its shape with the arrival of your time. It had been around 16th century when the evolution of the computer started. The initial computer faced many changes, obviously for the betterment. It continuously improved itself in terms of speed, accuracy, size, and price to urge the form of the fashionable day computer. This long period is often conveniently divided into the subsequent phases called computer generations:
- First Generation Computers (1940-1956)
- Second Generation Computers (1956-1963)
- Third Generation Computers (1964-1971)
- Fourth Generation Computers (1971-Present)
- Fifth Generation Computers (Present and Beyond)