history of computers1 essays

history of computers1 essays Somewhere around 3000BC the first mechanical counting device created was the abacus. The abacus is still used today and, amazingly to me, with great speed and accuracy. In 1642 another mechanical device was created called the Pascaline (after Blaise Pascal, a famous French mathematician). The Pascaline used gears and wheels ("counting-wheels") to perform the calculations. The interesting thing to note is that the counting-wheel design was used in calculators until the 1960s. The next major breakthrough in computer history revolves around Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. The machines that Charles designed in the early 1800s were not electronic computers as we know them now but they were general-purpose computational devices that were designed to be driven by steam. Charles is credited with being the "Father of Computing" due to the fact that his designs were WAY ahead of his time. He laid the foundation for the modern computer. Another computer development spurred by the war was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) produced by a partnership between the U.S. government and the University of Pennsylvania. Consisting of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 5 million soldered joints, the computer was such a massive piece of machinery that it consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power, enough energy to dim the lights in an entire section of Philadelphia. Developed by John Presper Eckert (1919-1995) and John W. Mauchly (1907-1980), ENIAC, unlike the Colossus and Mark I, was a general-purpose computer that computed at speeds 1,000 times faster than Mark I. These first computers were extremely large, slow, and inefficient. Many things happened between the creation of the ENIAC and now. Among the most interesting and pertinent to us in this course is the development of the microcomputer. The major development of ...