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Peter Beens

Computers: History and Development - 0 views

www.dia.eui.upm.es/...comp_hd.htm

shared by Peter Beens on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • abacus, which emerged about 5,000 years ago in Asia Minor and is still in use today, may be considered the first computer
  • In 1642, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the 18-year-old son of a French tax collector, invented what he called a numerical wheel calculator to help his father with his duties. This brass rectangular box, also called a Pascaline, used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long.
  • In 1694, a German mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz (1646-1716), improved the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply. Like its predecessor, Leibniz's mechanical multiplier worked by a system of gears and dials.
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  • The real beginnings of computers as we know them today, however, lay with an English mathematics professor, Charles Babbage (1791-1871). Frustrated at the many errors he found while examining calculations for the Royal Astronomical Society, Babbage declared, "I wish to God these calculations had been performed by steam!" With those words, the automation of computers had begun.
  • Babbage's first attempt at solving this problem was in 1822 when he proposed a machine to perform differential equations, called a Difference Engine
  • One of the few people who understood the Engine's design as well as Babbage, she helped revise plans, secure funding from the British government, and communicate the specifics of the Analytical Engine to the public. Also, Lady Lovelace's fine understanding of the machine allowed her to create the instruction routines to be fed into the computer, making her the first female computer programmer. In the 1980's, the U.S. Defense Department named a programming language ADA in her honor.
  • Powered by steam and large as a locomotive
  • Babbage borrowed the idea of punch cards to encode the machine's instructions from the Jacquard loom. The loom, produced in 1820 and named after its inventor, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, used punched boards that controlled the patterns to be woven.
  • In 1889, an American inventor, Herman Hollerith (1860-1929), also applied the Jacquard loom concept to computing. His first task was to find a faster way to compute the U.S. census
  • Instead of ten years, census takers compiled their results in just six weeks with Hollerith's machine.
  • Hollerith brought his punch card reader into the business world, founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, later to become International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924
  • First Generation (1945-1956)
  • Second Generation Computers (1956-1963)
  • By 1948, the invention of the transistor greatly changed the computer's development.
  • Third Generation Computers (1964-1971)
  • Jack Kilby, an engineer with Texas Instruments, developed the integrated circuit (IC) in 1958
  • Fourth Generation (1971-Present)
  • Fifth Generation (Present and Beyond)
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