Who built the first computer and how it was?

Answer 1

A: For personal computer has to be apple. They had a scheme all set up give the apple to schools for free, WHY? Any computer is worthless unless there is software to run it. So students pick it up and generated simple sometimes useful software to run it. IBM big in sales force but no idea followed to make money walla Microsoft got the contract for DOS disk operating system that Was written in one month but the nerd Bill Gates. I think that is remarkable What i think remarkable is the insistence of IBM to restrict the memory to 640k They thought that nobody will ever write a program needing all those memories

Answer 2

Charles Babbage, who designed various versions of what he called the "Difference Engine", a purely mechanical but highly sophisticated calculator, in the 1820s - 1840s. For some reason he did not complete the full version, which is in London's Science Museum, but a few years ago Science Museum staff completed sufficient of it to prove its successful design.

One theory for the original incompletion was contemporary attainable limits of accuracy in machining the components, but the Science Museum proved in fact they had been made to appropriately high precision.

Babbage intended his Difference Engine to be used for calculating logarithm and trigonometrical tables, mainly for navigators at the time. Hitherto such tables could be compiled only by long, tedious and error-prone manual mathematics.

Special-to-purpose mechanical calculators were used in the World Wars for ship's gun-laying and aircraft bomb-aiming, but they can't really be called computers. Further back, instrument-makers had developed the Orrery, a more-or-less complex mechanical model of the Solar System, using gear-trains to show the relative motions of the planets and their satellites as known at the time.

The world's first programmable electronic computer was the 'Colossus', designed around the mathematical principles developed by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in WW2, in conditions of the utmost secrecy to crack the German 'Enigma' coding machine. The Royal Navy had recovered an Enigma from a captured U-boat, and the whole project was so successful that the Nazis feared they had a traitor at a very high level in their own midst.

The discrete transistor, let alone integrated circuit, had yet to be invented so the computer used thermionic valves ('vacuum tubes' in US parlance) and relays.

It was about a year before the UK Government told its US Allies that Britain had cracked the Enigma codes. Bizarrely, at the close of the War, Winston Churchill personally ordered not only continued secrecy, but the destruction of the Colossus - the latter decision no doubt thought wise at the time but with hindsight an appalling blunder!