COMPUTER HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

COMPUTER HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The abacus, which emerged about 5,000 years ago in Asia Minor and is still in use today, may be considered the first computer.

Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchman, invented a machine that could perform the four basic arithmetic functions.

The real beginnings of computers as we know them today, however, lay with an English mathematics professor, Charles Babbage (1791-1871). He found while examining calculations for the Royal Astronomical Society, Babbage's assistant, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1842) and daughter of English poet Lord Byron, Lady Lovelace's fine understanding of the machine allowed her to create the instruction routines to be fed into the computer, making her the first female computer programmer. In the 1980's, the U.S. Defense Department named a programming language ADA in her honor.

First Generation (1945-1956)

With the onset of the Second World War, governments sought to develop computers to exploit their potential strategic importance. By 1941 German engineer Konrad Zuse had developed a computer, the Z3, to design airplanes and missiles. The Allied forces, however, made greater strides in developing powerful computers. In 1943, the British completed a secret code-breaking computer called Colossus to decode German messages. The Colossus's impact on the development of the computer industry was rather limited for two important reasons.

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.

In 1951, the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer), built by Remington Rand, became one of the first commercially available computers to take advantage of these advances. Both the U.S. Census Bureau and General Electric owned UNIVACs.

Second Generation Computers (1956-1963)

By 1948, the invention of the transistor greatly changed the computer's development. smaller, faster, more reliable and more energy-efficient than their predecessors. A computer could print customer invoices and minutes later design products or calculate paychecks. More sophisticated high-level languages such as COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (Formula Translator) came into common use during this time, and have expanded to the current day.

Third Generation Computers (1964-1971)

Jack Kilby, an engineer with Texas Instruments, developed the integrated circuit (IC) in 1958. Another third-generation development included the use of an operating system that allowed machines to run many different programs at once with a central program that monitored and coordinated the computer's memory.

Fourth Generation (1971-Present)

The Intel 4004 chip, developed in 1971, took the integrated circuit one step further by

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