History of Computers

Ancient Computers
Fingers and toes Stones Abacus (3000 bc)

A mechanised gadget using beads sliding upon rods, which is often used for a counting machine not really computation. The actual abacus is recognized as a counting system for the reason that all of the calculation continues to be carried out by the individual using the unit. The abacus does show, that a device may be utilized to store figures.

The Abacus Roman Times

The Forerunners of Computers

1620 Napier's bones

Napier's bones
In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier's Bones.

Slide Rule
Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

 In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) but couldn't sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren't that accurate

Mechanical Devices

Built a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner

1670 Leibnitz Stepped Reckoner

Jacquard's Loom (1810)

Jacquard's Loom
In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these are the punched cards have been in use ever

Punch Cards Descendant By selecting particular cards for Jacquard's loom you defined the woven pattern

Babbage's Difference A steam driven calculating Engine (1833)

machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine Would have been able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. He obtained government funding for this project due to the importance of numeric tables in ocean navigation

Babbage's Analytical Engine (1833)

Next brainstorm the Analytic Engine / Mill and Store (memory unit & central processing unit (CPU). ) Large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines Programmable using punched card technology Babbage saw that the pattern of holes could be used to represent raw data required for that problem's solution. The punch card could be employed as a storage mechanism, holding computed numbers for future reference

Babbage's Analytical Engine (1833)

The Analytic Engine also had a key function that distinguishes computers from calculators: the conditional statement A conditional statement allows a program to achieve different results each time it is run Ada Byron- the first computer programmer. Ada invented the subroutine and was the first to recognize the importance of looping

Herman Hollerith (1880)

Punched Cards

An operator working at a Hollerith Desk like the one above

 Consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards

Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC - 1939)

The First Computer
First electronic digital computing devices.

The machine was not programmable, being designed only to solve systems of linear equations

Mark I (1944) First American Programmable Computer

Built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM

First programmable digital computer made in the U.S

ENIAC (1946) Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator

First electronic generalpurpose computer.
It was Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems

The Beginning
So variation of computers have existed long before we can ever imagine? BUT The first real computer that came available to the public was in 1951. There have been about five generations where this new technology has been rapidly developing.