1970 1980 computer history essay
Index - s - s - s - s. In and '71, responding to a request for 12 custom chips for a new high-end calculator, and with incredible overkill, a young startup company named Intel built the world's first single-chip general-purpose microprocessor. The Intel ran at a clock speed of kHz and contained transistors see chip photo. It processed data in 4 bits, but it used bit addresses. It had sixteen 4-bit registers and ran an instruction set containing 46 instructions, each taking either 8 or 16 clock cycles to complete, yielding performance of about 60, instructions per second 92, peak. This made it roughly equal to the original ENIAC in the size of a fingernail, at a time when the CPUs of most computers still took several large circuit boards.
History of Computers
In fact, calculation underlies many activities that are not normally thought of as mathematical. Walking across a room, for instance, requires many complex, albeit subconscious, calculations. Computers, too, have proved capable of solving a vast array of problems, from balancing a checkbook to even—in the form of guidance systems for robots—walking across a room. Before the true power of computing could be realized, therefore, the naive view of calculation had to be overcome.
The inventors who laboured to bring the computer into the world had to learn that the thing they were inventing was not just a number cruncher, not merely a calculator. For example, they had to learn that it was not necessary to invent a new computer for every new calculation and that a computer could be designed to solve numerous problems, even problems not yet imagined when the computer was built.
They also had to learn how to tell such a general problem-solving computer what problem to solve. In other words, they had to invent programming. They had to solve all the heady problems of developing such a device, of implementing the design, of actually building the thing.
The history of the solving of these problems is the history of the computer. That history is covered in this section, and links are provided to entries on many of the individuals and companies mentioned. In addition, see the articles computer science and supercomputer. The earliest known calculating device is probably the abacus. It dates back at least to bce and is still in use today, particularly in Asia. Now, as then, it typically consists of a rectangular frame with thin parallel rods strung with beads.
Long before any systematic positional notation was adopted for the writing of numbers, the abacus assigned different units, or weights, to each rod. This scheme allowed a wide range of numbers to be represented by just a few beads and, together with the invention of zero in India, may have inspired the invention of the Hindu-Arabic number system.
In any case, abacus beads can be readily manipulated to perform the common arithmetical operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—that are useful for commercial transactions and in bookkeeping.
The abacus is a digital device; that is, it represents values discretely. A bead is either in one predefined position or another, representing unambiguously, say, one or zero. Calculating devices took a different turn when John Napier , a Scottish mathematician, published his discovery of logarithms in As any person can attest, adding two digit numbers is much simpler than multiplying them together, and the transformation of a multiplication problem into an addition problem is exactly what logarithms enable.
This simplification is possible because of the following logarithmic property: the logarithm of the product of two numbers is equal to the sum of the logarithms of the numbers. By , tables with 14 significant digits were available for the logarithms of numbers from 1 to 20,, and scientists quickly adopted the new labour-saving tool for tedious astronomical calculations.
Most significant for the development of computing, the transformation of multiplication into addition greatly simplified the possibility of mechanization. In Edmund Gunter , the English mathematician who coined the terms cosine and cotangent , built a device for performing navigational calculations: the Gunter scale, or, as navigators simply called it, the gunter. That first slide rule was circular, but Oughtred also built the first rectangular one in The analog devices of Gunter and Oughtred had various advantages and disadvantages compared with digital devices such as the abacus.
What is important is that the consequences of these design decisions were being tested in the real world. In the German astronomer and mathematician Wilhelm Schickard built the first calculator. He described it in a letter to his friend the astronomer Johannes Kepler , and in he wrote again to explain that a machine he had commissioned to be built for Kepler was, apparently along with the prototype , destroyed in a fire.
He called it a Calculating Clock , which modern engineers have been able to reproduce from details in his letters. But Schickard may not have been the true inventor of the calculator. A century earlier, Leonardo da Vinci sketched plans for a calculator that were sufficiently complete and correct for modern engineers to build a calculator on their basis.
The first calculator or adding machine to be produced in any quantity and actually used was the Pascaline, or Arithmetic Machine , designed and built by the French mathematician-philosopher Blaise Pascal between and It could only do addition and subtraction, with numbers being entered by manipulating its dials.
Pascal invented the machine for his father, a tax collector, so it was the first business machine too if one does not count the abacus.
He built 50 of them over the next 10 years. In the German mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz designed a calculating machine called the Step Reckoner.
It was first built in Leibniz was a strong advocate of the binary number system. Binary numbers are ideal for machines because they require only two digits, which can easily be represented by the on and off states of a switch. When computers became electronic, the binary system was particularly appropriate because an electrical circuit is either on or off. This meant that on could represent true, off could represent false, and the flow of current would directly represent the flow of logic.
Leibniz was prescient in seeing the appropriateness of the binary system in calculating machines, but his machine did not use it. Instead, the Step Reckoner represented numbers in decimal form, as positions on position dials.
Even decimal representation was not a given: in Samuel Morland invented an adding machine specialized for British money—a decidedly nondecimal system. With other activities being mechanized, why not calculation? In Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar of France effectively met this challenge when he built his Arithmometer , the first commercial mass-produced calculating device. It could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and, with some more elaborate user involvement, division.
Calculators such as the Arithmometer remained a fascination after , and their potential for commercial use was well understood.
Many other mechanical devices built during the 19th century also performed repetitive functions more or less automatically, but few had any application to computing. There was one major exception: the Jacquard loom , invented in —05 by a French weaver, Joseph-Marie Jacquard.
The Jacquard loom was a marvel of the Industrial Revolution. A textile-weaving loom, it could also be called the first practical information-processing device.
The loom worked by tugging various-coloured threads into patterns by means of an array of rods. By inserting a card punched with holes, an operator could control the motion of the rods and thereby alter the pattern of the weave.
Moreover, the loom was equipped with a card-reading device that slipped a new card from a prepunched deck into place every time the shuttle was thrown, so that complex weaving patterns could be automated.
What was extraordinary about the device was that it transferred the design process from a labour-intensive weaving stage to a card-punching stage. Once the cards had been punched and assembled, the design was complete, and the loom implemented the design automatically. The Jacquard loom, therefore, could be said to be programmed for different patterns by these decks of punched cards.
For those intent on mechanizing calculations, the Jacquard loom provided important lessons: the sequence of operations that a machine performs could be controlled to make the machine do something quite different; a punched card could be used as a medium for directing the machine; and, most important, a device could be directed to perform different tasks by feeding it instructions in a sort of language—i.
It is not too great a stretch to say that, in the Jacquard loom, programming was invented before the computer. Article Media. Info Print Print. Table Of Contents. Submit Feedback. Thank you for your feedback. Load Previous Page.
Early history Computer precursors The abacus The earliest known calculating device is probably the abacus. Digital calculators: from the Calculating Clock to the Arithmometer In the German astronomer and mathematician Wilhelm Schickard built the first calculator. Load Next Page. More About. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
Gene Amdahl, father of the IBM System/, starts his own company, Amdahl Corporation, to compete with IBM in mainframe computer systems. The V/6 was. Albert Snyder from Layton was looking for computer history essay. Graham Griffiths found the answer to a search query
Barry M. The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities.
In fact, calculation underlies many activities that are not normally thought of as mathematical.
In particular, when viewing the movies you should look for two things: The progression in hardware representation of a bit of data: Vacuum Tubes s - one bit on the size of a thumb; Transistors s and s - one bit on the size of a fingernail; Integrated Circuits s and 70s - thousands of bits on the size of a hand Silicon computer chips s and on - millions of bits on the size of a finger nail. The progression of the ease of use of computers: Almost impossible to use except by very patient geniuses s ; Programmable by highly trained people only s and s ; Useable by just about anyone s and on. Mauchly and J.
History of computing
C omputers truly came into their own as great inventions in the last two decades of the 20th century. But their history stretches back more than years to the abacus: a simple calculator made from beads and wires, which is still used in some parts of the world today. The difference between an ancient abacus and a modern computer seems vast, but the principle—making repeated calculations more quickly than the human brain—is exactly the same. Read on to learn more about the history of computers—or take a look at our article on how computers work. It is a measure of the brilliance of the abacus, invented in the Middle East circa BC, that it remained the fastest form of calculator until the middle of the 17th century.
From ARPANET to World Wide Web: An Internet History Timeline
The ERMA system had revolutionized behind-the-scenes check processing in the s, spawning the funny letters still at the bottom of checks today. During the s researchers in various countries have been working on bringing automation — and online transactions — to customers in the form of an Automated Teller Machine ATM. The paper used by some of the first ATMs is slightly radioactive, to be machine readable. The s will also see rapid growth in behind-the-scenes financial transaction networks, like SWIFT for wire transfers. In a departure from using magnetic core memory technology, IBM introduces the System Model mainframe computer, the company's first all-semiconductor memory computer. The Model could store an equivalent amount of data in half the space, compared to a computer using core memory. The Pascal programming language, named after Blaise Pascal, a French physicist, mathematician and inventor turned philosopher, is introduced by Professor Niklaus Wirth. His aim with Pascal was to develop a programming language applicable to both commercial and scientific applications, and which could also be used to teach programming techniques to college students.
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The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals.
Brief History of the Internet
Find out if your paper is original. Our plagiarism detection tool will check Wonder how much time you need to deliver your speech or presentation? Don't know how to format the bibliography page in your paper? Use this converter to calculate how many pages a certain number Create a strong thesis statement with our online tool to clearly express The history of computers is short but very complicated. Computers have been through lot of changes throughout the past half-century. They also affect our society in many different ways today. The following paper describes how the computers have changed from to present.
Essay Sample on the History of Computers: Key Changes Along a Timeline
Despite the high job demand, computer science remains a male-dominated field in the United States. In response, many top colleges are making efforts to recruit female computer science students, making it an ideal time for women to pursue computer science degrees. The computer science field has been trying to appeal more to female employees by moving toward longer maternity leave and better work-life balance for working moms. However, efforts to attract women to tech-related careers need to begin in elementary school. On this page, you can learn more about why women aren't choosing tech careers and what can be done to change that. Starting when computer technology first emerged during World War II and continuing into the s, women made up most of the computing workforce. By , however, women only accounted for According to NPR , personal computers were marketed almost exclusively to men and families were more likely to buy computers for boys than girls. Computers are now commonplace, especially in classrooms. While it's hard to pinpoint a single reason for the lack of female computer science majors, researchers are finding that introductory computer science courses play a big role in discouraging women from majoring in computer science.
