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Some of the earliest computers built in the 1940s used electronic circuits and components originally developed for use in telephone automatic dialing exchanges and long distance trunks designed in the late 1930s. These automatic dialing exchanges replaced manual switchboard exchanges that had been used in large cities since the early 1890s. The telephone itself was invented in the early 1870s. The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, and by 1886, more than 150,000 people in the U.S. were using telephones.

However the concept of the programmable digital computer is even older, as it was developed by Charles Babbage in the 1830s. But Babbage's computer was to have been entirely mechanical powered by a steam engine, but as he was unable to get any funding to build it much of his ideas had to be reinvented over 100 years later when vacuum tube based electronic circuits were available to replace the gears, cams, clutches, levers, etc. that Babbage designed his computer around.

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8y ago

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