4basic Periods Of Histoty
The Electronic Age: 1940 - Present.
1. First Tries. In the early 1940s, scientists around the world began to realize that electronic vacuum tubes, like the type used to create early radios, could be used to replace electromechanical parts.
The First Stored-Program Computer
EDVAC ,Mauchly and Eckert began to design the EDVAC - the Electronic Discreet Variable Computer -to address this problem.
The First General-Purpose Computer for Commercial Use.
Eckert and Mauchly began the development of a computer called UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), which they hoped would be the world's first general-purpose computer for commercial use, but they ran out of money and sold their company to Remington Rand.
The Four Generations of Digital Computing.
Information technology has traditionally been broken down into four or five distinct stages or computer generations, each marked by the technology used to create the main logic element (the electronic component used to store and process information) used in computers during the period.
1. The Beginnings of Telecommunication.
Technologies that form the basis for modern-day telecommunication systems include: a. Voltaic Battery. The discovery of a reliable method of creating and storing electricity (with a voltaic battery) at the end of the 18th century made possible a whole new method of communicating information. b. Telegraph. The telegraph, the first major invention to use electricity for communication purposes, made it possible to transmit information over great distances with great speed. c. Morse Code. The usefulness of the telegraph was further enhanced by the development of Morse Code in 1835 by Samuel Morse, an American from Poughkeepsie, New York. d. Telephone and Radio. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876
Pre-Mechanical age
The earliest age of technology. It can be defined as the time between 3000 B.C. and 1450 A.D. When humans first started communicating, they would try to use language to make simple pictures - petroglyphs to tell a story, map their terrain, or keep accounts such as how many animals one owned, etc.
The Electromechanical Age: 1840 - 1940.
The electromechanical age can be defined as the time between 1840 and 1940. These are the beginnings of telecommunication. The telegraph was created in the early 1800s. Morse code was created by Samuel Morse in 1835.
The Mechanical Age: 1450 - 1840
The mechanical age is when we first start to see connections between our current technology and its ancestors. The mechanical age can be defined as the time between 1450 and 1840. A lot of new technologies were developed in this era due to an explosion of interest in computation and information.
2. Electromechanical Computing
a. Herman Hollerith and IBM. By 1890, Herman Hollerith, a young man with a degree in mining engineering who worked in the Census Office in Washington, D.C.The company that he founded to manufacture and sell it eventually developed into the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). b. Mark 1. Howard Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, decided to try to combine Hollerith's punched card technology with Babbage's dreams of a general-purpose, "programmable" computing machine.
3. Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.
a. Slide Rule. In the early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English clergyman, invented the slide rule, a device that allowed the user to multiply and divide by sliding two pieces of precisely machines and scribed wood against each other. The slide rule is an early example of an analog computer — an instrument that measures instead of counts. b. Pascaline. Blaise Pascal, later to become a famous French mathematician, built one of the first mechanical computing machines as a teenage, around 1642. It was called a Pascaline, and it used a series of wheels and cogs to add and subtract numbers. c. Leibniz's Machine. Gottfried von Leibniz, an important German mathematician and philosopher (he independently invented calculus at the same time as Newton) was able to improve on Pascal's machine in the 1670s by adding additional components that made multiplication and division easier.
4. Babbage's Engines
a. The Difference Engine. An eccentric English mathematician named Charles Babbage, frustrated by mistakes, set his mind to creating a machine that could both calculate numbers and print the results. In the 1820s, he was able to produce a working model of his first attempt, which he called the Difference Engine (the name was based on a method of solving mathematical equations called the "method of differences"). b. The Analytical Engine. Designed during the 1830s by Babbage, the Analytical Engine had parts remarkably similar to modern-day computers. c. Augusta Ada Byron. She helped Babbage design the instructions that would be given to the machine on punch cards (for which she has been called the "first programmer") and to describe, analyze, and publicize his ideas.
Eckert and Mauchly.
a. The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes, the ENIAC. John Mauchly, a physicist, and J. Prosper Eckert, an electrical engineer, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the U.S.
