How a computer started and all the history of computers

How a computer started and all the history of computers

Brief History and background Of Computer.

It all started with the invention of a calculator by Blaise Pascal in 1642 aged 18, the French scientist and philosopher invented the first calculator to help his Tax-Collector Father do his sums. Decades later in 1671 a German Mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented a similar more advanced Device. In 1854 an English Man by the name of George Boole invented a branch of Mathematics called Boolean Algebra. Which is now used in Modern Computers as Binary code which allows computers to make simple decisions by comparing long strings of ones and zeros.

Charles Babbage is the First person to attempt to make a computer as his Calculators had an input (a way of feeding in numbers), a memory (something to store these numbers while complex calculations were taking place), a processor (the number-cruncher that carried out the calculations), and an output (a printing mechanism) the same basic components shared by all modern computers. Augusta Ada Byron notebooks were rediscovered in the 1930s, computer scientists finally appreciated the brilliance of his ideas. Unfortunately, by then, most of these ideas had already been reinvented by others. Babbage had intended that his machine would take the drudgery out of repetitive calculations. Originally, he imagined it would be used by the army to compile the tables that helped their gunners to fire cannons more accurately. Toward the end of the 19th century, other inventors were more successful in their effort to construct "engines" of calculation. American statistician Herman Hollerith (1860–1929) built one of the world's first practical calculating machines, which he called a tabulator, to help compile census data

The history of computing remembers colorful characters like Babbage, but others who played important if supporting roles are less well known. At the time when CTR was becoming IBM, the world's most powerful calculators were being developed by US government scientist Vannevar Bush (1890–1974). In 1925, Bush made the first of a series of unwieldy contraptions with equally cumbersome names.

Moderm Computers
After the World War II years were a crucial period in the history of computing, when powerful gargantuan computers began to appear. Just before the outbreak of the war, in 1938, German engineer Konrad Zuse constructed his Z1, the world's first programmable binary computer, in his parents' living room.The following year, American physicist John Atanasoff and his assistant, electrical engineer Clifford Berry , built a more elaborate binary machine that they named the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC). It was a great advance—1000 times more accurate than Bush's Differential Analyzer. These were the first machines that used electrical switches to store numbers: when a switch was "off", it stored the number zero; flipped over to its other, "on", position, it stored the number one. Hundreds or thousands of switches could thus store a great many binary digits (although binary is much less efficient in this respect than decimal, since it takes up to eight binary digits to store a three-digit decimal number). These machines were digital computers: unlike analog machines, which stored numbers using the positions of wheels and rodsthey stored numbers as digits.