History of Computers

Originated as Calculating Machines

Abacus Babylonians 3000 B.C.

Napier's Bone

John Napier (1617 )

Multiplication and Division

Slide Rule

William Oughtred in England in 1632

Logarithm, roots

Most common before the the development of digital computers.

Until 1960s

Mechanical calculators

Schickard's Clock

German professor Wilhelm Schickard (1623)

Pascaline

Blaise Pascal (1642)

Punched card

Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard (1801)

Difference Engine

English mathematician
Charles Babbage (1822)
Steam driven
Polynomial , logarithmic ,
trigonometric functions
Never functional

Analytic Engine

1837

Powered by 6 stem engines

General purpose computer

Programmable and data stored

using Punched card technology of
Jacquard Loom.
Storage Unit called 'Store' and
processing unit 'Mill'.
Correspond to modern day CPU
and memory concept.
Conditional statement (different
from calculator)

Mark I

Harvard University and IBM (1944)

First fully automated digital
computer
Not purely electronic

Switches, rotating shafts,

clutches

hundreds of miles of wire, 16 m in

length, 2.4 m in height, It had a
weight of about 10,000 pounds
(4500 kg).
Operated on numbers 23 digits
wide.

add or subtract two of these

numbers inn 3/10 th of a
second,

multiply them in 4s, and divide

them in 10 seconds.

ABC computer

Earliest attempts to build an allelectronic (no mechanical parts)

digital computer in 1937 by J. V.
Atanasoff and Clifford Berry.
By 1941 they build a machine
that could solve 29 simultaneous
equations with 29 unknowns.
First to store data as a charge
on a capacitor memory
(same mechanism as DRAM).
Used binary arithmetic

ENIAC

Was the first general purpose

electronic computer
Ability of being reprogrammed for
different problems
University of Pennsylvania between
1943 and 1945 by two professors,
John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
Got funding from the war department to
compute table for artillery gun
positions and was used in the
calculation for hydrogen bombs.
filled a 20 X 40 ft room, weighed 30
tons, and used more than 18,000
vacuum tubes.
Could only hold 20 numbers at a time.
Faster than the Mark I: a multiplication
that required 6 seconds on the Mark I
could be performed on ENIAC in 2.8
thousandths of a second.

Commercial Computers

Mauchly and Eckert set up their own company which produced the first commercial
computer the UNIVAC

(Universal Automatic Computer)

By 1955 IBM was selling more computers than UNIVAC

IBM model 650 is one of the first widely used computers.

In 1957 IBM 305 used magnetic disk for the storage (tapes were used prior to that)

1959 IBM introduced two desk-sized computers IBM 1401 for business and IBM
1620 for scientist.
The invention of transistors (which replaced vacuum tubes) and Integrated Circuit
(Texas Instruments) enabled the shrink in the size of computers

Programming languages

By 1959 more than 200 programming languages were

created.
1960 COBOL, - Grace hopper.
1965 John Kemeny of Dartmouth - BASIC programming
language

Microcomputers

By 1964 18,000 computers

1970 Large scale integration

Enabled the fabrication of large number of circuits in a single chip

I971 Microprocessors (uP) was invented in Intel

A microprocessor (uP) is a processing unit that is fabricated on an

integrated circuit (IC) or a chip.

Intel was the first to succeed in cramming an entire processing unit

on a single chip (IC).

The Intel 4004 was first such chip

In 1975 MITS Inc. produced

the first microcomputer, the
Altair using Intel 8080.
It was sold for less than $400.
Used Altair BASIC from
Microsoft

Developed by Bill Gates

and Paul Allen

1976 Steve Jobs and Steve

Wozniak build the first Apple
Computer

Hand built

Apple II (1977)

First successfully massproduced micro computers

1980 IBM offered microsoft to build operating

system.
Microsoft developed MS-DOS

IBM PC became the largest share in market for PCs

by 1981.

Helped the tremendous growth of microsoft

1984 Apple - Macintosh computer with

Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a mouse.

1992 microsoft released Windows 3.1

3,000,000 copies sold in 2 months

1993 several companies introduced computers by

using Pentium processors.
1990s 2000s

Yahoo, Amazon, ebay, were established.

Java programming language was developed by Sun

Microsystems

Google was founded in 1998

2003 myspace.com

2004 - facebook.com

2005 youtube.com

2004 Apple sleek iMac G5. System

unit housed inside the display box.
2006 Intel - Core 2 duo processors
family
2006 IBM fastest supercomputer
Blue Gene. 28 trillion calculations
in 1 / 10 th of a second