Objectives
This unit is intended to enable students to understand:
- The historical evolution of computers
- The contributions of important people in the history of computers
- Computer generation
- Characteristic features of computers in different computer generations,
- The contributions of important people in the development of computer generations.
- The defferences between computers and calculators.
edu.uptymez.com
HISTORY OF COMPUTER
Calculating machine: The first calculating device called abacus was discovered by Egyptian and Chinese people.
Napier’s bones (1617s):
This is the calculating device invented by John Napier for calculating Products and quotients of numbers.
Slide rule (1970s): This is the first analogy computer.
Pascal’s adding and subtraction machine: At age of 19, Pascal invented machine that they can add and subtract large numbers.
Leibniz multiplication and division machine: The first mechanical calculator capable of dividing and multiplying invented by Leibniz.
Babbage’s analytical engine: analytical engine invented by Charles’s Babbage’s he is known as father of computer
Mechanical Electrical calculator: In 1960s electrical calculator that uses vacuum tubes to perform arithmetic operation was discovered later on vacuum tubes replaced by transistors as a result the size of calculator become very small.
Early Start
Computers have been around for quite a few years. Some of your parents were probably around in 1951 when the first computer was bought by a business firm. Computers have changed so rapidly many people cannot keep up with changes.
One newspaper tried to relate how the fast changes in computer technology would look to a similar pace in the out industry.
“Had the automobile developed at a pace (equal) to that of the computer during the past twenty years, today a Rolls Royce was cost less than $ 3.00, get 3 million miles to the gallon, deliver enough power to drive (the ship) the Queen Elizabeth II and six of them would fit on the head of a pin”
These changes have occurred so rapidly that many people do not know how our modern computer got its start.
The first Computing machines “Computers”
Since ancient times, people have had ways to deal with data and numbers. Early people tied knots in rope and carved marks on clay tablets to keep track of livestock and trade.
Some people considered the 5000- year-old ABACUS – a frame with beads strung on wires to be the first true computing aid.
As trade and tax system grow in complexity, people saw that faster, more reliable and exact tools were needed for doing math and keeping records.
In the mid-1600’s Blaine Pascal and his father, who was a tax officer himself, were working on taxes for the French government in Paris. The two spent hours figuring and prefiguring taxes that each citizen owed. Young blase decided in 1642 to build an adding and subtraction machine that could aide in such a tedious and time consuming process.
The machine Blaine made had a set of eight gears that worked together much like an odometer keeps track of a car’s mileage. His machine encountered many of problems. For one, it was always breaking down.
Second, the machine was slow and extremely costly. And third, people were afraid to use the machine thinking it might replace their jobs. Pascal later became famous for math and philosophy, but he is still remembered for his role in computer technology. In his honor, there is a computer language named Paschal.
The next big step for computer arrived in the 1830’s when Charles Babbage decided to build a machine to help him complete and print mathematical tables. Babbage was a mathematician who taught at Cambridge University in England. He began planning his calculating machine calling it the Analytical Engine. The idea for this machine was amazingly like the computer we know today. It was to read a program from punched cards, figure and store the answers to different problems, and print the answer on paper. Babbage died before he could complete the machine. However because of his remarkable ideas and work, Babbage is known as the Father of Computers.
The next huge step for computers comes when Herman Hollerith entered a contest given by the U.S. Census Bureau. The contest was to see who could build a machine that would count and record information faster. Hollerith, a young man working for the Bureau built a machine called the Tabulating Machine that read and sorted data from punched cards. The holes punched in the cards matched each person’s answers to questions. For example, married, single and divorces were answers on the card. The Tabulator read the punched cards as they passed over tiny brushes. Each time a brush found a hole, it completed an electrical circuit. This caused special counting dials to increase the data for that answer.
Thanks to Hollerith’s machine, instead of talking seven and a half years to count the census information it only took three years, even with 13 million more people since the last census. Happy with his success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. The Company later was sold in 1911 and in 12 his company become the International Business Machines Corporation, better known today as IBM.
The first Electric Powered Computer
What is considered to be the first computer was made in 1944 by Harvard’s Professor Howard Aiken. The Mark I computer was very much like the design of Charles Babbage having mainly mechanical parts, but with some electronic parts. His machine was designed to be programmed to do many computer jobs. This all- purpose machine is what we now know as the PC or personal computer. The Mark I was the first computer financed by IBM and was about 50 feet long and 8 feet tall. It used mechanical switches to open and close its electric circuits. It contained over 500 miles of wire and 750,000 parts.