The History of computers

By KendallPIT

Per- 7th

The First Computer• First programmable

computer: -The Z1

-created in Germany by Konrad Zuse in his parents living room in 1936 to 1938-was made to help with lengthy engineering equations.- had 64 word memory- A clock speed of 1Hz- was programmed with punch tape and all outputs came out on punch tape-punch tape: long strips of paper in which holes were punched to store data.

“Debug”• Debugging is the process of locating and fixing or bypassing errors, or

“bugs”, in computer program code or the engineering of a hardware device• To debug a program or hardware device is to start with a problem, isolate

the source of the problem, and then fix it. • Almost any new product is likely to have bugs because of the thousands of

lines of code.• The term bug dates back to at least 1878 and was debugging seems to

have been used as a term in aeronautics before computers came about• Many people attribute the term to Admiral Grace Hopper, who’s associates

discovered a moth stuck in a relay in a Mark II Computer and she remarked hey were “debugging” the system.

Internet begins• The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw

great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields.

• .C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962

Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

• The Analytical Engine is a mechanical digital computer and first fully automated calculating machine, it anticipated virtually every aspect of present-day computers.

• The machine was designed to evaluate any mathematical formula and to have even higher powers of analysis than any other machine at this time.

• Charles Babbage was an eminent figure in his day, elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828 but resigned in 1839 to focus on his Analytical Engine.

• It was only after the first electromechanical and later, electronic computers had been built in the twentieth century, that designers of those machines discovered the extent to which Babbage had anticipated almost every aspect of their work.

• Only part of the trial machine was completed before Babbage’s death in 1871.

Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine

• Herman Hollerith is widely regarded as the father of modern automatic computation. • he built the first punched-card tabulating and sorting machines as well as the first key punch,

and he founded the company that was to become IBM. • These machines made it much easier to process and calculate equations and reduced a ten-

year job to three months, saved the 1890 taxpayers five million dollars, and earned him an 1890 Columbia PhD¹.

• It was the first successful information processing system to fully replace pen and paper.

ENIAC• ENIAC stands for electronic numerical integrator and computer• The idea came about it 1936 when British mathematician, Alan Turing proposed the idea of a

machine that could process equations without human direction.• It was the world’s first electronic digital computer and was provided by the extraordinary

demand of war to find the solution to a task of surpassing importance.• It was built at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in

Philadelphia and completed in 1945.• It is regarded as the first successful, general digital computer.

Program

• A Program is an organized list of instructions that, when executed, causes the computer to behave in a predetermined manner.

• Without programs, computers are useless.

The benefit of the transistor replacing vacuum tubes

• The transistor is an influential invention that changed the course of history for computers.• The vacuum tube was used to amplify music and voice and made long-distance calling

practical, but the tubes consumed power, created heat, and burned out rapidly, making them very high maintenance.

• The transistor is a device composed of semi-conductor material that can both conduct and insulate thereby solving the problems with vacuum tubes. Transistors switch and modulate electronic current.

• The transistor was the first device designed to act as both a transmitter, converting sound waves into electronic waves, and resistor, controlling electronic current.

first microcomputer• In 1975, Ed Roberts was the “father of the microcomputer” and designed the first

microcomputer called the Altair 8800, which was produced by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS).

• In the same year, two young hackers, William Gates and Paul Allen approached MITS and promised to deliver a BASIC compiler. So they did and from the sale, Microsoft was born.

binary system• The word “binary” describes a system that has only two possible digits.• It works essentially the same way as the decimal system only it has only two digits. These

digits are visually expressed by 0 and 1. Every number in the binary system is a combinations of these two digits.

• The binary system is essential in technology. The reason being that any electronic circuit can only have two possible states, on or off. Any sequence of 0 an 1 has a certain meaning.

• Every communication that takes place inside your computer uses this binary system.

Recourses Cited:• http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/z/z1.htm• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape• http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050298.htm• http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid92_gci211915,00.ht

ml• http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/• www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/...and.../1878-3.aspx• http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hollerith.html• http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/comeniac.htm• http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html• http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/program.html• http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa061698.htm• http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_invented_the_first_microcomputer• http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/binary1.html