A Few Facts About The History Of Computers | Technology Professional

A Few Facts About The History Of Computers

A great deal of our lives depends today on the existence of computers. Whether we use them in order to do our jobs, or to communicate with the beloved ones when they are not close, or better enough, to watch movies and keep informed, we cannot conceive anymore living without computers. Their history is quite recent, and started with the famous abacus, which later on made scientists develop more sophisticated formulas which would simplify the running of these machines.

So departing from the abacus, numerous mathematicians and scientists worked in order to ameliorate the machine, which at the beginning had only one function: to calculate. Amongst the first computers we can count the “Arithmometer”, built in 1820, the first mass-produced calculator, which did multiplications using an approach developed by Leibniz; it could also do division, with assistance from the user. In 1832, Charles Babbage conceived the “Analytical engine”, a programmable calculator, which was able to do an addition in 3 seconds and a multiplication or division in 2-4 minutes. The machines were big enough and pretty slow, if we compare them with computers nowadays.

When World War II brought with it the invention of new weapons and military devices, which had to be controlled by a computer. Consequently, this need led to the apparition of the electronic digital computers, supposed to calculate the trajectory tables for these new weapons. The father of the Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator is John Mauchly who, with his associates, built a computer 1000 times faster than the older generation of computers. It could also multiply two numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. Even the machine was big enough and consumed a lot of energy, it is considered to be the most effective high-speed electronic digital computer in his generation. Latter inventions made it become obsolete, so it was used only from 1946 to 1955.

A better computer had to appear, so the 1950s mark the rise and development of that which nowadays is common knowledge: the magnetic core memory, ancestor of the RAM. However, during the 1960s scientists realized that the smaller the components and computer circuits, the more efficient the machine was, so they continued the research until the 1980s, when the very large scale integration was common piece of construction for computers. This new device consisted in the placing of hundreds of thousands of transistors on a single chip. Also during the 80s, microprocessors began to be used, making of this decade one of the most rich in inventions in the history of computers. Which was already well shaped and ready to accept new members.

The “shrinking” trend went on and culminated with the introduction of personal computers (PC’s), programmable machines small and cheap enough to be purchased and used by individuals. We have the laptops today and technology hasn’t stopped evolving, which makes us wonder how computers will still evolve. However, computers are seen as devices whose main purpose is to simplify man’s work and whose development goes on because we constantly need efficient machines.