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History of Computers
A computer is something which calculates
information given to it.
Computers evolved as people developed
tools to help themselves calculate.
Use of Hands and Hand Tools
- Prehistoric people moved beyond 20 by drawing
lines on walls, making notches in sticks, tying knots in
a cord (the quipu), making symbols on clay tablets with
a cuneiform, and finally writing on papyrus.
- The first device created specifically for calculating,
the first computer, was the abacus.
It is a wooden frame with beads which are moved along the
rod to count. The bottom row represents the ones and the
top row represents fives.
- John
Napier invented another calculating tool which used
marked strips of bone or wood. It was called Napiers Bones.
Gear Driven Machines
- Wilhelm Schickard built the first mechanical
calculator in 1623.
- In 1642 Blaise
Pascal built the first digital counting machine with
gears to help his father who was a tax collector. It only
added.
- In 1671 Joseph
von Liebniz invented a machine which used a special
"stepped gear". It could add and multiply.
- In the early 1800s Joseph-Marie
Jacquarddeveloped a weaving loom which used special
"punched cards".
These cards contained instructions which controlled the
pattern of the weaving.
- In 1820 Thomas of Colmar invented the Arithometer.
It could add, subtract, multiply and divide.
- George
Boole, a British mathematician and inventor, developed
a system of algebraic logic which we know as Boolean operators.
These operators let mathematicians reduce any equation to
a true or false decision. They became a key tool in computer
design.
- Charles
Babbage, an English inventor and mathematician, decided
to design a machine that would solve mathematical equations
without the element of human error. He called it the Difference
Engine. It would have had gears that were powered by steam.
It was never actually built because the tools available
weren't sophisticated enough to make the parts. The slightest
imperfections would throw it off. In 1834 he finished the
plans for another machine which he called the Analytical
Engine. It was the first general purpose computer. This
was another steam powered machine which used Jacquard's
punched cards to feed information into the machine. It wasn't
actually built until 1991. It had five key features of modern
computers: an input device, a storage place, a processor,
a control unit which directed the operations, and a printer.
Babbage is known as the "Father of the Computer" because
his work inspired future inventors.
- Ada
Augusta Byron, the Countess of Lovelace, was the first
computer programmer. She was the daughter of Lord Byron
and a gifted mathematician. She helped develop the instructions
for doing computations on the analytical engine. She and
Babbage developed structures and procedures which are the
basis of modern programming. The programming language ADA
is named after her.
Electro-Mechanical Machines
-
The 1880 census took seven years to finish.
The Census Bureau wanted to find a faster way to do it before
the 1890 census. They held a contest to see who could come
up with a better idea. Herman
Hollerith was the winner of the contest at age 20. He
invented the first electronic calculator. It used punched
cards which were pushed over special brushes and each time
a hole in the card went over the brush it completed an electrical
circuit. This would signal a counting gear to move. Each
location of a hole represented a specific characteristic
of the population. Using this machine, it took only 6 weeks
to report the census. Hollerith went on to found the Tabulating
Machine Company which eventually became IBM.
- For more than 50 years punched card machines
were used and improved, but nothing radically new was invented.
Machines were invented which had memories (they could store
information) and could be programmed to do more than one
job.
Electronic Computers
- In 1930 Vanevar Bush introduced the first electronic
calculator. It was called the Differential
Analyzer. It was an analog device. It used vacuum tubes
to switch electrical signals on and off. It could do 25
calculations in just a few minutes.
- John
Atanasoff and his assistant Clifford Berry designed
the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s. They
called it the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry
Computer). It used vacuum tubes and did arithmetic functions.
They used Boole's concept of true and false decisions and
translated them to the on/off switches of the vacuum tubes.
- Vacuum tubes were electronic tubes about the
size of a light bulb. Computers used thousands of these
tubes, which meant the computers were very large and very
hot.
- In 1937 Howard Aiken began building the Mark
I, with funding from IBM. It could add, subtract, multiply
and divide. It was made up of 78 adding machines and desk
calculators and 500 miles of wire. It could print on punched
cards or on an electric typewriter. It was 51 feet long
and 8 feet high. It had 3,000 electrical switches. It took
5 years to build and was technologically obsolete before
it was finished. It took the Mark I 3 seconds to perform
a single multiplication.
- During World War II the military used computers
in building new weapons and to crack secret codes. Konrad
Zuse developed the Z3 to design planes and missiles. One
British computer which was used to break codes was called
Colossus. Colossus was a one ton machine developed by Alan
Turing and Tommy Flowers. It unscrambled codes electronically
using programming decisions structures.
- Grace
Hopper, a naval officer, originated the term "computer
bug" when she found that the cause of a computer problem
was a moth fused to a wire in the computer. She later developed
an early computer language called COBOL.
- In 1946 John Mauchly and John Eckert used the
ideas from ABC to build the first general purpose electronic
computer. It was called ENIAC
(Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). It had
no mechanical parts, it worked solely on vacuum tubes. It
had 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighed 30 tons. Each tube had
an electronic circuit. Each circuit could turn on and off.
There was a set of switches for every number. It was 1,000
times faster than the Mark I, but it required a 20' x 40'
room and had to be operated from outside that room.
- Also in 1946 Jon
von Neumann proposed changes in the way that computers
were being made. He thought computers should have instructions
stored inside them. He also proposed using 0's and 1's to
stand for the on and off switches in the computer to code
information. This was the beginning of the binary code which
is used today to program computers. 0 = off and 1 = on.
- Maurice Wilkes, a student of von Neumann, built the EDSAC.
It was the first computer to use the stored program concept.
It was built in 1949 in Cambridge England.
- In 1951 the designers of ENIAC, working for Remington
Rand, designed UNIVAC,
Universal Automatic Computer. It contained 5,400 vacuum
tubes and used magnetic cores to store data. It was the
first electronic digital computer sold to businesses. There
were a total of 48 of them built. A UNIVAC computer correctly
predicted that Dwight Eisenhower would win the 1952 election.
Second Generation:
Transistors
- By 1957 transistors were replacing vacuum tubes
in computers. One transistor did the work of 40 vacuum tubes
and was much smaller. This meant computers could be much
smaller and faster. They were also cooler faster and used
less energy.
Third generation: Integrated
Circuits
-
In 1959 Texas Instruments and Fairchild
Semiconductor introduced the integrated circuit. It was
made up of hundreds of circuits placed on one tiny silicon
chip. Each chip replaced several thousand transistors.
- In the 1960's the space program needed even
smaller computers to put in spacecraft. They used integrated
circuits instead of transistors. This led to the development
of mini-computers
some of which could even fit on a desktop!
- Software began to be sold separately from the computer
and the same software could be used on different models
of computers. In 1968 Douglas Englebart introduced an early
word processing program. Englebart worked at the Stanford
Research Institute where he developed the first mouse along
with many other concepts which formed the basis of modern
computing
- In 1969 Xerox established PARC, the Palo Alto
Research Center. Many of the people who had worked at Stanford
went to work at PARC and brought Englebartís ideas with
them.
- John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, professors of
Mathematics at Dartmouth developed the structured programming
language known as Basic. They are the authors of True Basic
the programming language we use.
Fourth generation: Microprocessors
-
In the 1970s microprocessors were developed
by engineers at Intel using Large Scale Integration, which
let one chip do many different jobs and allowed computers
to operate with just a few chips. As chips got more and
more sophisticated, computers got faster and smaller and
were able to store more information. In addition to computers,
microprocessors can be found in watches, calculators, cars,
televisions, etc.
-
The very first personal computer produced
was the Altair,
produced in 1975. It was built by MITS. It had no screen
and no keyboard. You used switches and dials to enter data.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen met at Harvard. When the Altair
was introduced. They left Harvard and moved to Albuquerque
where the Altair was manufactured. They formed a company
called Microsoft and developed software for the Altair.
When MITS went out of business, Microsoft moved to Washington
state.
-
Apple Computer was started by Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak, working in a garage. They started Apple
Computer in 1977. The first Apple was just parts and you
had to build your own case and provide a keyboard. It was
the first easy to use computer. Then they introduced the
Apple II line of computers which were the first computers
to use color graphics. They were the best selling computer
at that time.
-
In 1981 IBM introduced the first IBM PC.
It was made from parts which were available to everyone,
this is known as using an open architecture. This meant
that other companies could build computers using the same
parts and software for lower prices. These computers became
known as IBM compatibles, or clones. IBM hired Microsoft
to develop an operating system for their computer. Microsoft
purchased an existing operating system, reworked it and
named it called it MS DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System).
Some of the best known clone manufacturers today are Dell,
Toshiba, Hewlett Packard , and Gateway. Today Microsoft
operating systems and Intel microprocessors dominate the
computer market . This combination has been nicknamed "Wintel".
- At about this time Xerox
PARC was developing ideas which would lead to a revolution
in the computer industry. PARC researchers developed the
GUI (graphical user interface), ethernet, and the laser
writer printer. The laser writer was the first printer to
print out exactly what was on the computer screen, this
is known as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).
- In 1984 Apple introduced Macintosh which was
the first computer to use a GUI. It was the first user friendly
computer. Microsoft later introduced it's Windows operating
system which also uses a GUI.
The Internet
- In 1858 a communication cable was laid across
the Atlantic.
- In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone.
- In 1957 in reaction to the Russian launching
of Sputnik, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) was
created. It was given the task of improving the use of computers
in the military.
- Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation came up with
the idea of a network with no central authority which could
continue to operate if parts of it were destroyed. This
network would use packet switching. Messages would be sent
across the network as a series of packets. When all the
packets arrived at the destination they would be reassembled.
- ARPANetwas
developed in 1969 to enable computers in different military
research centers around the country to communicate with
each other. Research universities and defense department
contractors joined the network. It was all text based and
not very user friendly. Two computers at UCLA and Stanford
were connected on October 1, 1969 and ARPANet was born.
- In 1972 Ray Tomlinson created the first email
program. The use of email to send messages back and forth
began to dominate the network. Email became the first "killer
app" of the Internet.
- Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf developed the TCP
(Transmission Transfer Protocol) which let other networks
connect to ARPANet. In 1974 they became the first to use
the term Internet to refer to these connected networks.
- In 1974 Telenet became the first commercial
version of ARPANet. It was the first public network.
- In 1976 Robert Metcalfe of Xerox PARC developed
Ethernet. In 1978 it became TCP/IP. The IP stands for Internet
Protocol. It is still used today to network computers and
other devices.
- In 1990 Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist in
Switzerland, created the idea of the World Wide Web because
he wanted to be able to easily communicate with scientists
around the world. He envisioned the web as a "shared information
space." He is known as the "father of the Web."
- In 1993 Marc Andreessen, a student at Stanford,
led the team which created the first web browser. It was
called Mosaic. He founded Netscape and created the Netscape
Navigator browser which made the Internet user friendly
and led to it's rapid growth. The two main web browsers
in use today are Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/timeline/network.html
Computers:History
and Development
Triumph
of the Nerds
Who
Are These Nerds
Can
You Guess the Computer
Calculating
Machines
Computer
History Museum: Top 10 Artifacts
The
Computer History Museum
A
Brief History of Computers and Networks
A
History of Computers Timeline
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