History of ComputerThe AbacusThe Abacus is considered the very first computer in history. It emerged about 5000 years ago in asia and still is used in countries like China and japan. It is first way of making calculation and is made of wooden box consisting small beads sliding on racks. Abacus was very popular through out the history of computer. But as the use of pencil and paper spread in Europe it lost its importance.
John Napier BonesAnother manual machine was John Napier Bones. It was cardboard multiplication calculation. It was designed in early 17th century.
Numerical Wheel Calculation:
Blaise PascalNumerical wheel calculation was invented by Blaise Pascal in 1642. It could only add and subtraction numbers. Division and multiplication was done by repeated addition and subtraction. this calculation was called pascaline.
Gottfried Wilhelm Von LeibnizIn 1694, a German scientist Leibniz developed a calculating machine; in fact it was improvement on pascaline. He made a machine which could multiply beside addition and subtraction.
Charles Xavier Thomas ColmanCharles Xavier Thomas De Colman a French man improved this machine in such way that it could perform four basic arithmetic operation e.g. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Charles BabbageDifference Engine:While Tomas of Colmar was developing the first successful commercial calculator, Charles Babbage realized as early as 1812 that many long computations consisted design a calculating machine which could do these operations automatically. he produced a prototype of this "difference engine" by 18222 and with the help of the British government started work on the full machine in 1823. It was intended to be steam-powered; fully automatic, even to the printing of the resulting tables; and commanded by a fixed instruction program.
Analytical EngineIn 1833, Babbage ceased working on the difference engine because he had a better idea. His new idea was to build an " analytical engine". The analytical engine was a real parallel decimal computer which would operate on words of 50 decimals and was able to store 1000 such numbers. The machine would include a number of built-in operations such as conditional control, which allowed the instructions for the machine were to be stored on punched cards, similar to those used on a Jacquard Loom.
Herman HollerithA step toward automated computation was the instruction of punched cards, which were first successfully used in connection with computing in 1890 by Herman Hollerith working for the U.S. Census Bureau. He developed a device which could automatically read census information which had been punched onto card. Surprisingly, he did not get the idea form the work of Babbage, but rather form watching a train conductor punch tickets. As a result of his invention, reading errors were consequently greatly reduced, work flow was increased, and more important, stacks of punched cards could be used as an accessible memory store of almost unlimited capacity; Furthermore, different problems could be stored on different batches of cards and worked on as needed. Hollerith's tabulator became so successful that he started his own firm to market the device; this company eventually became International Business Machines (IBM).
First Electronic ComputerProfessor John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built the world's first electronic-digital computer at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer represented several innovations in computing, including a binary system of arithmetic, parallel processing, regenerative memory, a separation of memory and computing functions.
Mark IBy the late 1930s punched-card machine techniques had become so well established and reliable that Howard Aiken, in collaboration with engineers at IBM, undertook construction of a large automatic digital computer based on standard IBM electromechanical parts. Aiken's machine, called the Harverd Mark|, handled 23-decimal-place numbers (words) and could perform all four arithmetic operations; moreover, it had special built in programs, or subroutines, to handle logarithms and trigonometric functions. The Harvard mark I was the first of a series of computers designed and built under Aiken's direction.
ENIACENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrated and Calculator was an all-electronic computer. It was developed from military.John W. Mauchly and J.Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania invented ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer) that used a word of 10 decimal digital instead of binary ones like previous automated calculators/computers. The executable instructions composing a program were embodied in the separate units of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a route through the machine for the flow of computations. These connections had to be redone for each different problem, together with presetting function tables and switches. This "wire-your-own" instruction technique was inconvenient.
EDVACEDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was great improvement upon ENIAC. As the operation of functionality ENIAC was limited because of wiring board. This problem was overcome by a new concept of stored program is that the data should be stored into computer memory for automatically directing the flow of directions. EDSAC Maurice V.Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge constructed the EDSAC: Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer. The design was based on that of Von Neumann. EDSAC was the world's first practical stored program electronic computer, although not the first stored program computer.
UNIVA IThe UNIVAC I (University Automatic Computer I) was the first commercial computer made in the United States, and the third commercial worldwide. It was designed principally by J.Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. The UNIVAC handled both numbers and alphabetic characters equally well. The UNIVAC I was unique in that it separated the complex problems of input and output form the actual; computation facility.
ConclusionSumming up the point we can conclude that the computer we are familiar these days, were not introduction in their current shape. This the result of hard work done by many people. The early computer were handled manually. Now computer perform all the operation automatically.
