History of computers

The very first calculating device was fingers of a man's hand. Then the abacus was invented and people went on using it till the 16th century. During the 17th-18th centuries people tried to find easy ways of calculating. J. Napier, a Scotsman, invented a mechanical way of multiplying and dividing, a modern slide rule. Henry Briggs used Napier's ideas to produce logarithm tables.

The first real calculating machine appeared in 1820. In 1830 Charles Babbage, a gifted English mathematician, built a general-purpose problem-solving machine that he called "the analytical engine".

Dr. Herman Hollerith, a young statistician from the US Census Bureau successfully tabulated the 1890 census. He built one machine to punch the holes into cards and others to tabulate the collected data. Later Hollerith established his own company, which eventually became the IBM Corporation.

In 1930 the first analogcomputer was built by American named Vannevar Bush. This device was used in World War II to help aim guns.

Mark I, the first digital computer, was created in 1944 by Professor Howard Aiken. This was the first machine that could figure out mathematical problems at a very fast rate.

In 1946 two engineers at the University of Pennsylvania, J. Eckert and J. Maushly, built their digital computer with vacuum tubes. They named their new invention ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator).

In 1947 John von Neumann developed the Electronic Discrete Variable Computer, or EDVAC, which was able to store both data and instructions inside the computer's memory. He also contributed to the idea of storing data and instructions in a binary codethat uses only ones and zeros. Thus computers use two conditions, high voltage, and low voltage, to translate the symbols by which we communicate into unique combinations of electrical pulses.

By the end of the 1960s commercial computers were widely used for both scientific computation and business data processing. Initially these computers accepted their input data from punched cards. By the late 1970s punched cards had been almost universally replaced by keyboard terminals. Since that time advances in science have led to the proliferation of computers throughout our society, and the past is but the prologue that gives us a glimpse of the future.

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