Computer history
THE FIRST ERA COUNTING TOOLS
A long time ago some caveman must have realized that counting on fingers and toes was very limiting. They started making marks on rocks, carving notches in bones and tying knots in rope. Eventually, mankind found more practical ways to not only keep track of large numbers, but also to perform mathematical calculations with them.
PROGRAMMING 1842
Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace, was Charles Babbage's assistant. She knew his device would require instructions - what we would today call programs or software. So, over 170 years ago, she started designing computer programs. In so doing she developed certain programming ideas and techniques that are still used in modern programming languages today.
TURING MACHINE 1936
Alan Turing described a device which he called an "automatic machine". This hypothetical machine has the ability to read instructions and information from a tape and can write to the tape as well. In theory, this could solve any computational problem provided you had enough tape and a lot of patience. Eventually, these "devices" were called "Turing Machines". This lead to the term "Turing Complete". A computer is considered Turing Complete if it can solve any computational problem provided memory and execution time are not issues. Technically, Babbage's Analytical Engine would have been the first Turing Complete computer, had it been built at the time it was designed.
TIANHE-2 SUPERCOMPUTER 2013
As of June 2013, China's Tianhe-2 is the fastest computer in the world. It can perform 33,860,000,000,000,000 floating point operations in 1 second. That is 88 TRILLION times as fast as the ENIAC!
BOMBE 1939
Based on the Polish Bomba, Alan Turing designed the improved Bombe in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cyper School at Bletchley Park. Like its predecessor, it was designed to decrypt coded messages from the Nazi's Enigma machine, which was now far more complex than it was before World War II. NOTE: In the recent movie The Imitation Game this machine was erroneously called Christopher. This was one of several examples of "artistic license" used in the movie.
NUMERICAL CALCULATING MACHINE 1642
Blaise Pascal built the Pascaline. This was the first numerical calculating machine. The inner workings of this device are similar to the tumbler odometers found in old cars. It could perform addition and subtraction. A version of this device was still being used in the 1970s!
ANALYTICAL ENGINE 1833
Charles Babbage designed a machine that can read instructions from a sequence of punched cards. This would have been the first general purpose computing machine. Unfortunately, he was not able to complete the device due to lack of funding.
VISICALC 1979
Dan Bricklin created VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program, which became the first wide spread software to be sold.
GRACE HOPPER
Grace Hopper, then a Navy Lieutenant, was one of the first programmers of the Mark-I. She would make so many contributions to the world of computer science that the United States Congress allowed her to stay in the Navy past mandatory retirement age. She finally retired as an Admiral in 1986 at the age of 79.
TABULATING MACHINE 1889
Herman Hollerith invented a tabulating machine that records statistics for the U.S. Bureau of Census. The 1880 census took 8 years to tabulate by hand. With this punch-card tabulating machine, the 1890 census was tabulated in just 1 year.
IBM SYSTEM/360 1964
IBM creates a family of computers which cover a complete range of applications. These computers work for both the math community and the business community. All computers in this series are compatible, but sell for different prices based on their speed. System/360 is responsible for establishing a number of industry standards including the 8 bit byte.
IBM PC 1981
IBM's entry into the personal computer market gave the personal computer a serious image as a true business computer and not some sophisticated electronic game playing machine.
TABULATING MACHINE COMPANY 1896, 1911, 1924
In 1896, Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company. In 1911, this firm merged with three others to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Company. In 1924, the company was renamed International Business Machines Corporation.
BOMBA KRYPTOLOGICZNA 1938
In the years preceding World War II, the Nazis had a machine called Enigma which was used to send out coded messages. Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician and cryptologist, was able to figure out how the Enigma worked and construct his own Enigma-like device, but they still needed the key. With brute force trial and error, the Poles were able to "Break Enigma" in 1932 and for about 6 years they were intercepting and translating coded messages from the Nazis. To speed up this process with mechanization, Rejewski invented the Bomba Kryptologiczna (which translates to Cryptologic Bomb). In response to imminent Nazi invasion, they shared their breakthroughs with the French and the British and then destroyed all 6 of their own "bomb" machines.
INTEGRATED CIRCUIT 1958
Jack Kilby, of Texas Instruments, in Richardson, Texas, developed the first integrated circuit which has multiple transistors on a tiny thin piece of metal, called a chip. Jack Kilby used germanium. Six months later Robert Noyce came up with his own idea for an improved integrated circuit which uses silicon. He is now known as "The Mayor of Silicon Valley". Both gentlemen are credited as co-inventors of the integrated circuit. This began "The Third Generation of Computers". As technology improved, we developed the ability to put billions of transistors on a tiny microchip.
NAPIER'S "BONES" 1617 A.D.
John Napier used some bones marked with special scales to simplify arithmetic by using addition for multiplication.
VON NEUMANN ARCHITECTURE 1945
John von Neumann describes the design for an electronic digital computer. Like the Turing machine, this is a description of a Stored Program Computer, which means the computer stores both the program's instructions and its data in RAM.
JACQUARD'S LOOM 1805
Joseph Jacquard invented a special loom that would accept special flexible cards that are punched with information in such a manner that it is possible to program how cloth will be weaved. It is one of the first examples of programming.
Z3 1941
Konrad Zuse builds an electro-mechanical computer capable of automatic computations in Germany during World War II. It was the first functional, programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was destroyed in 1943 during the Allied bombing of Berlin. Some people argue that the Z3 was Turing Complete and therefore proclaim Konrad Zuse as the "inventor of the computer".
WORDSTAR 1979
MicroPro releases WordStar, which became the most popular word processing program.
WINDOWS 95 1995
Microsoft introduces Windows 95, which uses an operating system similar to the Macintosh computer.
MS-DOS 1981
Microsoft, an unknown little company run by Bill Gates, agreed to produce the operating system for the IBM Personal Computer and became a company larger than IBM.
THE SECOND ERA GEAR DRIVEN DEVICES
More complicated tasks required more complicated devices. These devices would have rotating gears. Since they did not use electricity, they would require some form of manual cranking in order to function. One problem with devices that have moving parts is that they wear and break.
MARK-II 1947
On September 9, 1947 the Mark-II stopped working. A technician found and removed moth from one of its relays. This was the first literal computer bug. The actual moth is currently on display at the San Diego Computer Museum.
THE MACINTOSH 1984
The "Mac" was the first commercially successful computer with the mouse/windows technology. The mouse technology was already developed earlier by Xerox Corporation.
THE ABACUS 3000 B.C.
The Abacus was originally invented in the Middle Eastern area. This rather amazing computing device is still very much used in many Asian countries today.
APPLE II 1977
The Apple Computer Company was created and introduced the Apple II Personal Computer. It became the first commercially successful personal computer.
COMPAQ PORTABLE 1982
The Compaq Portable is known for two things. It was the first portable computer. By today's standards it was nothing like a modern laptop. The 28 pound computer was the size of a small suitcase. Compaq was also the first computer to be 100% compatible with an IBM PC.
EDVAC 1949
The EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was the successor to the ENIAC. The main improvement was that it was a Stored Program Computer. This meant is could store a program in electronic memory. (about 5½ kilobytes).
ENIAC 1946
The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first electronic general purpose computer. It was invented by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. This computer is twice the size of the Mark-I, contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, and is programmed by rewiring the machine.
ENIAC 1946
The ENIAC was capable of performing 385 multiplication operations per second. In 1949, it was the first computer used to calculate PI. The press called it "The Giant Brain."
COLOSSUS 1943
The Nazis had a machine called the Lorenz SZ-40 Cypher which was even more complicated than the Enigma. The Colossus was the first computer that could reliably decrypt the Lorenz Cypher. This was also the first electronic digital computer that was somewhat programmable. It was designed by an engineer named Tommy Flowers. A total of 10 Colossus computers were made. At the end of the war, all Colossus computers were destroyed for secrecy. The British code breakers at Bletchley Park would not receive any credit until these events were declassified in 2012.
UNIVAC I 1951
The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) was the world's first commercially available computer. The computer became famous when it correctly predicted the results of the 1952 presidential election.
WINDOWS 1.0 1985
The first Windows operating system was actually an Operating Environment which acted as a front while MS-DOS was running in the background.
VIDEO GAMES 1958/1962
The first video game was called Tennis for Two. It was created by William Higinbotham and played on a Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope. Since this game did not use an actual computer monitor, some give credit for the first video game to SpaceWar! written by Stephen Russell at MIT in 1962.
THE FIFTH ERA COMPUTERS WITH TRANSISTORS OR INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
The invention of the transistor began "The Second Generation of Computers". The University of Manchester made the first transistor computer in 1953. Transistors have certain key advantages over vacuum tubes. They are much smaller. They do not get hot and burn out.
THE THIRD ERA ELECTRO-MECHANICAL DEVICES
The term electro-mechanical device means the device uses electricity, but still has moving parts. These devices are not yet "fully electronic". Since they do use electricity, the manual cranking is no longer needed. Since they still have moving parts, they still break down easily.
MARK-I 1944
This electro-mechanical calculator was 51 feet long and 8 feet tall. It was the first machine that could execute long computations automatically. These computations could involve several numbers, each up to 23 digits in length.
THE FOURTH ERA FULLY ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS WITH VACUUM TUBES
This is often referred to as "The First Generation of Computers". Fully electronic computers do not rely on moving parts. This makes them faster and more reliable. The vacuum tubes used at the time still had their share of drawbacks. They were big and bulky. They would get hot and burn out.
THE SLIDE RULE 1622
William Oughtred created the slide rule. This device allows sophisticated mathematical calculations and was used for centuries until it was replaced by the scientific calculator in the 1970s.
ABC 1940
he very first electronic digital computer, the ABC, was invented by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University. This was not a "general purpose computer", nor was it programmable (So not Turing Complete.) It was specifically designed to solve systems of linear equations.