In the stone age the earliest computing device present in the world is the five fingers of each hand, and it is the most popular counting system since the earlier days of the human race.
It was not more then a few thousands' years when someone thought for calculation by using the pebbles instead of using fingers. Thus ten pebbles are used instead of the five fingers for calculations. The calculation by using pebbles has remained for centuries and it is consisted as the best calculation system in the stone age.
About five thousands' years before in the valley of Tigris-Euphrates and about 460 BC in Egypt an idea arose for making a clay board with a number of grooves into which the pebbles were placed. Calculations were made by sliding pebbles along the grooves from one side to the other.
The grooved pebble became known in China , Japan and Rome by various means such as the deported slaves.
The grooved pebble was modified in China and known as the abacus, while the grooved pebble that modified in Japan was known as soroban. Abacus was the first mechanical computer that performed all the arithmetic operations., and in the hands of a skilled operator it can be as fast as desk-type computers. The soroban or abacus is still is used by Japanese and Chinese.
After reaching this milestone, the development of computing devices seems to have stagnated for the next two thousand years.
The real beginning of mechanical era of computers goes back to the seventeenth century, from which we date our 'modern era' in just about every field of endeavor.
The development of logarithms by John Napier in 1614, and their conversion to the base 10 by Henry Briggs in 1615, stimulated the invention of various devices. One such device, invented by John Napier in 1617, was a mechanical arrangement of numbering rods, which could do multiplication. These became known later, fittingly, as 'Napier's bones.'
A slide rule without moving parts, based upon Napier's logarithms, was invented in 1620 by Edmund Gunter. This was improved upon by the introduction of a sliding scale by William Oughtred in 1632. He gave it the name 'astrolabe' because of its astronomical uses.
The real history of modern computing began with an analog machine. In 1623 German scientist Wilhelm Schikard invented a machine that used 11 complete and 6 incomplete sprocketed wheels that could add and, with the aid of logarithm tables, multiply and divide
Perhaps most significant in the evaluation of the mechanical calculators was the introduction ,in 1642, of the tooth wheels by Blaise Pascal who was the famous French philosopher and mathematician. Although this machine is limited to addition and subtraction. Pascal built 50 copies of his machine, but most served as curiosities in parlors of the wealthy.
It was not long before scientists realized that Pascal's toothed wheels could also perform multiplication. The German philosopher and mathematician, Baron von Leibniz, added this improvement to the Pascal machine in 1671. The Leibniz machine known as 'rockoning machine' was the first machine designed for multiplication but mechanical flaws prevented it from becoming popular.
In 1820 Thomas de Colmar improved Pascal's calculator sufficiency to make it practicable for multiplication. Over the next sixty years Thomas made some 1500 machines.
In the early 19th century French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard devised a specialized type of computer: ‘a loom’. Jacquard’s loom used punched cards to program patterns that were output as woven fabrics by the loom. Though Jacquard was rewarded and admired by French emperor Napoleon I for his work, he fled for his life from the city of Lyon pursued by weavers who feared their jobs were in jeopardy due to Jacquard’s invention. The loom prevailed, however: When Jacquard passed away, more than 30,000 of his looms existed in Lyon. The looms are still used today, especially in the manufacture of fine furniture fabrics.
The Newton of the computer field was Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University. It was in 1812 that Babbage first Conceived the idea of building a machine that could solve differential equations and print the answers. He worked on his machine, named as 'differential engine' with the help of the British Government for some twenty years, but finally gave up in 1842.
Although equally unsuccessful in practice, the ideas behind Babbage's next project -- 'the analytical engine'-- proved to be the seeds for the development of large scale modern digital computers. The idea as conceived by Babbage is the basis of all automatic computing, but the Babbage's analytical engine never worked; it was too far ahead of its time.
Augusta Ada Byron (Countess of Lovelace, 1815-52) was a personal friend and student of Babbage. She was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron and one of only a few woman mathematicians of her time. She prepared extensive notes concerning Babbage’s ideas and the Analytical Engine. Ada’s conceptual programs for the Engine led to the naming of a programming language (Ada) in her honor. Although the Analytical Engine was never built, its key concepts, such as the capacity to store instructions, the use of punched cards as a primitive memory, and the ability to print, can be found in many modern computers.
Though Babbage's ideas did not come into their own until a century later, other workers in the field improved the existing mechanical calculators considerably.
Dorr Felt patented a key-driven adding machine in 1850 and developed a practical machine in 1866.
In 1887 a patent was issued for an improved machine. At about the same time William Seward Burrouhs produced one of the first commercial adding machines. Many improvement were made upon these early designs in succeeding years, the printing feature (in 1899) being perhaps the most important
Herman Hollerith, an American inventor, used an idea similar to Jacquard’s loom when he combined the use of punched cards with devices that created and electronically read the cards. Hollerith’s tabulator was used for the 1890 U.S. census, and it made the computational time three to four times shorter than the time previously needed for hand counts. Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company eventually merged with other companies in 1924 to become IBM.
The first appearance of electrical computers was in the 1920s, when the General Electric Company and Westinghouse both invented analogue machines for simulating the behavior of networks. These were known as d.c. network analysers. A much more versatile machine, the a.c network analyser, was introduced in 1929. This machine occupies a large-sized room.
In 1936 British mathematician Alan Turing proposed the idea of a machine that could process equations without human direction. The machine (now known as a Turing machine) resembled an automatic typewriter that used symbols for math and logic instead of letters. Turing intended the device to be used as a “universal machine” that could be programmed to duplicate the function of any other existing machine. Turing’s machine was the theoretical precursor to the modern digital computer.
Meanwhile continual improvements were being made on the mechanical analogue computing devices, such as the ball-and-disc integrator. These mechanical improvements culminated in the development at Massachusetts Institute of Technology of a large-scale completely mechanical 'differential analyser' by Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1931.
In the mid -- 1930s Hartree and Porter at Manchester University devised a model mechanical differential analyser`
M.I.T. Staff developed a more advanced differential analyser, in which all interconnections could be made by electrical means. This machine was first brought out in 1942, solved important military problems during the second world war. Although in principal it is still a mechanical computer, the second M.I.T differential analyser uses about 200 miles of wire, 3000 relays, 150 electric motors, and 2000 electronic valves.
The first large-scale fully automatic digital computer was almost certainly the IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. This machine, which later became known as Mark I, was the brainchild of American mathematician Prof. Howard Aiken of Harvard. Its development began in 1937 and went on until 1944. The Harvard-IBM Mark I calculator has all the important functional components of an automatic digital computer. This electronic calculating machine used relays and electromagnetic components to replace mechanical components. In later machines, Aiken used vacuum tubes and solid state transistors (tiny electrical switches) to manipulate the binary numbers. Aiken also introduced computers to universities by establishing the first computer science program at Harvard University. Aiken never trusted the concept of storing a program within the computer. Instead his computer had to read instructions from punched cards.
Although more advanced electromechanical computers were built in the 1940s. The first one, called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), was constructed between 1942 and 1945 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania.
ENIAC, the first large-scale, general purpose, digital computer. ENIAC was initially built for the United States military to calculate the paths of artillery shells. It was later used to make calculations for nuclear weapons research, weather prediction, and wind tunnel design. ENIAC began operating in February 1946 and was used until October 1955.
ENIAC was built by the American physicist John W. Mauchly and the American electrical engineer J. Presper Eckert at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. Eckert and Mauchly successfully demonstrated ENIAC less than three years after the Army commissioned its construction. In 1947 ENIAC was moved from the University of Pennsylvania to its permanent home at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Only one system of its type was ever built, but it operated continuously until October 1955.
ENIAC used vacuum tubes to process data. It had 19,000 tubes, each the size of a small light bulb. The computer was composed of 30 separate units with additional power supplies and cooling units. It weighed more than 30 tons, occupied 1800 sq ft and consumed 175 kw of power.
ENIAC was designed to calculate continuously, day and night. However, because its circuitry was composed of a vast number of vacuum tubes that tended to burn out, ENIAC had to be constantly serviced. This continual servicing considerably reduced ENIAC’s net operating time. During a typical week, ENIAC was down for maintenance about one-third of the time. As soon as they completed the ENIAC design, Eckert and Mauchly signed a contract to build a successor, which they called EDVAC for Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer. This more efficient design reduced the number of vacuum tubes in the EDVAC to about 4000. EDVAC was the first electronic computer to use a program stored entirely within its memory.
Although it was the first large-scale machine to do routine calculations in a production environment, the ENIAC was not the first electronic computer. Between 1939 and 1942, John Atanasoff, a physics and mathematics professor at Iowa State University, and his graduate student Clifford Berry, assembled the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, which incorporated many digital circuit design innovations. Their system used the binary arithmetic system of 1s and 0s commonly used in today’s computers as well as a memory drum that stored data in a method similar to the storage technique used in modern memory chips.
After Eckert and Mauchly were granted a patent for the ENIAC, a long court battle began over who actually created the first modern electronic computer. Finally, in 1973, a federal judge invalidated the ENIAC patent and awarded recognition to Atanasoff and Berry, more than 30 years after their pioneering accomplishments.
UNIVAC, (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), the first electronic computer designed and sold to solve commercial problems. The UNIVAC contained about 5000 vacuum tubes, occupied 943 cubic feet, and weighed 8 tons. From 1951 to 1957 a variety of governmental and commercial customers bought a total of 48 UNIVAC computers.
The UNIVAC was a successor to the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator). The ENIAC was built for the United States armed services by American physicist J. Presper Eckert and American electrical engineer John Mauchly between 1943 and 1946. It was the first large-scale, general-purpose electronic computer. In 1947 and 1948 Eckert and Mauchly built an improved machine called the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), which incorporated some important design innovations by Hungarian American mathematician John von Neumann. In December 1948 Eckert and Mauchly left the University of Pennsylvania, where they had worked, and formally organized the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. In August 1949 they delivered a computer for (onboard) missile control to the Northrup Corporation, which they called BINAC (BINary Automatic Computer). BINAC was to be the prototype for the commercial UNIVAC system.
In March 1951 Eckert and Mauchly delivered the first UNIVAC to the U.S. Census Bureau. The UNIVAC gained national attention in 1952 when General Dwight D. Eisenhower was running against Adlai E. Stevenson for the presidency of the United States. A UNIVAC was used to predict the results of the election on national television. Using an early ballot count of only a few percent of the votes, UNIVAC predicted a landslide win for Eisenhower. The television networks delayed announcement of the predicted margin until a greater percentage of election returns could be counted. When a large enough percentage of the votes was finally counted, it was found that UNIVAC had been correct in its predictions. This successful demonstration contributed greatly to the popularity of the UNIVAC as well as to the public’s opinion of computers.
The UNIVAC contained many improvements over the earlier ENIAC. The number of vacuum tubes in the UNIVAC was reduced to about 5000 from ENIAC’s 19,000. UNIVAC’s 943 cubic feet of cabinets took up less floor space than ENIAC, but it still would have filled a single-car garage. The UNIVAC weighed 8 tons instead of the ENIAC’s 30 tons, and it consumed about 100 kilowatts of power instead of the 175 kilowatts of power that the ENIAC used. Despite the major improvements of the UNIVAC over the ENIAC, it was still extremely inefficient by today’s standards.
The UNIVAC could perform up to 1905 operations per second. Early UNIVAC customers included government agencies, the A. C. Nielsen Company, the Prudential Insurance Company, and the General Electric Appliance Division. UNIVAC computers were used for many different purposes, including accounting, data processing, and record keeping.
In 1948, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, American physicists Walter Houser Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Bradford Shockley developed the transistor, a device that can act as an electric switch. The transistor had a tremendous impact on computer design, replacing costly, energy-inefficient, and unreliable vacuum tubes.
In the late 1960s integrated circuits, tiny transistors and other electrical components arranged on a single chip of silicon, replaced individual transistors in computers. Integrated circuits became miniaturized, enabling more components to be designed into a single computer circuit. In the 1970s refinements in integrated circuit technology led to the development of the modern microprocessor, integrated circuits that contained thousands of transistors. Modern microprocessors contain as many as 10 million transistors.
Manufacturers used integrated circuit technology to build smaller and cheaper computers. The first of these so-called personal computers (PCs) was sold by Instrumentation Telemetry Systems. The Altair 8800 appeared in 1975. It used an 8-bit Intel 8080 microprocessor, had 256 bytes of RAM, received input through switches on the front panel, and displayed output on rows of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Refinements in the PC continued with the inclusion of video displays, better storage devices, and CPUs with more computational abilities. Graphical user interfaces were first designed by the Xerox Corporation, then later used successfully by the Apple Computer Corporation with its Macintosh computer. Today the development of sophisticated operating systems such as Windows 95 and Unix enables computer users to run programs and manipulate data in ways that were unimaginable 50 years ago.
Possibly the largest single calculation was accomplished by physicists at IBM in 1995 solving one million trillion mathematical problems by continuously running 448 computers for two years to demonstrate the existence of a previously hypothetical subatomic particle called a glueball. Japan, Italy, and the United States are collaborating to develop new supercomputers that will run these calculations one hundred times faster.
In 1996 IBM challenged Gary Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion, to a chess match with a supercomputer called Deep Blue. The computer had the ability to compute more than 100 million chess positions per second. Kasparov won the match with three wins, two draws, and one loss. Deep Blue was the first computer to win a game against a reigning world chess champion with regulation time controls. Many experts predict these types of parallel processing machines will soon surpass human chess playing ability, and some speculate that massive calculating power will one day replace intelligence. Deep Blue serves as a prototype for future computers that will be required to solve complex problems.
Future Developments
In 1965 semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors contained on a computer chip would double every year. This is now known as Moore’s Law, and it has proven to be somewhat accurate. The number of transistors and the computational speed of microprocessors currently doubles approximately every 18 months. Components continue to shrink in size and are becoming faster, cheaper, and more versatile.
With their increasing power and versatility, computers simplify day-to-day life. Unfortunately, as computer use becomes more widespread, so do the opportunities for misuse. Computer hackers—people who illegally gain access to computer systems—often violate privacy and can tamper with or destroy records. Programs called viruses or worms can replicate and spread from computer to computer, erasing information or causing computer malfunctions. Other individuals have used computers to electronically embezzle funds and alter credit histories. New ethical issues also have arisen, such as how to regulate material on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Individuals, companies, and governments are working to solve these problems by developing better computer security and enacting regulatory legislation.
Computers will become more advanced and they will also become easier to use. Reliable speech recognition will make the operation of a computer easier. Virtual reality, the technology of interacting with a computer using all of the human senses, will also contribute to better human and computer interfaces. Standards for virtual-reality program languages, called Virtual Reality Modeling language (VRML), currently are being developed for the World Wide Web.
Communications between computer users and networks will benefit from new technologies such as broadband communication systems that can carry significantly more data and carry it faster, to and from the vast interconnected databases that continue to grow in number and type.
