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Computer History
This category includes questions and answers about the history of the computer. Ask questions about the first computer and major developments in computing.
5,564 Questions
Who are the five inventors of the computer?
I don't know that there are exactly five. There is still debate in the field as to who was responsible. Some names are:
- Charles Babbage (but never built anything)
- Konrad Zuse (not well known outside Germany)
- John Vincent Atanasof
- Howard Aiken
- Presper Eckert & John Mauclhley
- Alan Turing
- Tommy Flowers (worked on British cryptoanalytic computers, work not unclassified until late 1970s so rarely credited in literature)
- etc.
How has computers benefited our world?
Which year was computer invented?
The first working computer was invented by an Englishman named Charles Babbage in the 1800s (1791-1871) but that followed the footsteps of Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834); who invented the punched card (for looms) and George Boole (1815-64) who invented the form of math (Boolean algebra) that allows computers to work.
There was little progress until WW II loomed and a need for gun trajectory calculations became important. Starting with relays (like the starter relay in your car) in 1936, Konrad Zuse built the first programmable computer of modern times.
Working for the Navy in 1942 John Atanasoff & Clifford Berry built the ABC computer using vacuum tubes. In 1946 Eckert & Mauchly built ENIAC with 20,000 vacuum tubes.
In 1951 they built UNIVAC, the first commercial computer.
Meanwhile, back in 1948 Bardeen, Brattain & Shockley invented the transistor.
In 1958 Kirby & Noyce invented (developed?) the integrated circuit.
In 1971 Faggin, Hoff & Mazor built the 4004 - the FIRST microprocessor.
In 1976 the Mark 8 Altair (as seen in War Games) and the IBM 5100 were built - the first consumer computers.
In 1976/77 we had the Apple I, the TSR-80, and the Commodore Pet. Mass market computers (although we had to wait till 1979 for the Apple II).
1974
What was the name of Herman Holleriths invention?
The US 1880 census took over 7 years to complete. With the expanding population and new additional data collection requirements, the US 1890 census was expected to take longer than 10 years which would fail to meet the requirements of the constitution for apportioning the membership of Congress to the states. It was decided to have a competition for new sysstems for doing the census.
Herman Hollerith is the US Census Bureau worker that won the competition for a new system of performing a census. His system based on punchcards and electromechanical machines was then used in the US 1890 census. The US 1890 census was completed in a little over a year. Additional data was extracted and tabulated in the next couple years. He founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which was later to become IBM.
How many people operated the first computer?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC From what i gathered, mainly 6 i think.
A full timeline is very hard to piece together and would likely be hundreds of pages long. However I will make an attempt at touching some highlights:
- 1822, Difference Engine #1, London England, special purpose mechanical digital computer (never built).
- 1837, Analytical Engine, London England, programmable mechanical digital computer (never built).
- 1849, Difference Engine #2, London England, special purpose mechanical digital computer (not built until 1991 by the London Science Museum).
- 1931, Bush Differential Analyzer, MIT, programmable mechanical analog computer.
- 1931, Mark XV Norden Bombsight, Carl L. Norden Company, special purpose electromechanical analog computer (gravity bomb fall solution).
- 1938, Zuse Z1, Germany, programmable mechanical digital computer (floating point).
- 1941, Zuse Z3, Germany, programmable electromechanical digital computer (floating point).
- 1942, ABC, University of Iowa Ames Iowa, special purpose electronic digital computer (array/vector processor solving simultaneous equations up to 29 variables).
- 1943, Torpedo Data Computer (TDC) Mark IV, Arma Corporation, special purpose electromechanical analog computer (submarine torpedo aiming solution).
- 1944, Colossus Mark I, Bletchley Park, programmable electronic digital computer (cryptanalytic).
- 1944, Harvard Mark I, Harvard, programmable electromechanical digital computer.
- 1945, Zuse Z4, Germany, programmable electromechanical digital computer (floating point).
- 1946, ENIAC, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia Pennsylvania, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1948, Manchester Baby, Victoria University of Manchester, programmable electronic digital computer (first computer built using a stored program).
- 1949, CSIRAC, Australia, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1951, UNIVAC I, Remington Rand, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1951, UNIVAC 1101, Remington Rand, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1952, IBM 701, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1953, IBM 702, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1953, UNIVAC 1103, Remington Rand, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1953, IBM 650, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1954, IBM 704, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer (first US computer w/ floating point).
- 1954, IBM NORC, IBM, programmable electronic digital supercomputer (usually credited as being the first supercomputer).
- 1956, IBM 705 Model I, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1956, IBM 305 RAMAC, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer (w/ the first harddisk, the IBM 350).
- 1957, UNIVAC 1104, Remington Rand, ruggedized programmable electronic digital computer (designed for the BOMARC missile but never used, replaced by a version of the AN/USQ-20, designated the G-40).
- 1958, AN/FSQ-7, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer (part of the air force's SAGE air defense system, the largest computer ever built).
- 1959, DEC PDP-1, DEC, programmable electronic digital computer (the first computer sold that focused on user interaction rather than just efficient use of computer time).
- 1960, UNIVAC LARC, Sperry Rand, programmable electronic digital supercomputer (designed as a dual CPU computer but neither of the 2 systems built had the second CPU).
- 1961, IBM 7030 Stretch, IBM, programmable electronic digital supercomputer, failed to meet its ambitious performance goals (100 times the speed of an IBM 704) so considered a failure and withdrawn from production with only 9 machines built, however it introduced many concepts and features present in many modern computers: the byte, memory protection, generalized interrupts, cache memory, instruction pipelining, prefetch and decoding, memory bank interleaving, etc.
- 1961, AN/USQ-20, Sperry Rand, ruggedized programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1962, UNIVAC 1107, Sperry Rand, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1962, D-17B the Minuteman I missile guidance computer, Autonetics Division of North American Aviation, ruggedized programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1964, IBM System 360, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1964, CDC 6600, Control Data Corporation, programmable electronic digital supercomputer, with over 600 systems built it is considered to be the first mass produced supercomputer.
- 1964, D-37C the Minuteman II missile guidance computer, Autonetics Division of North American Aviation, ruggedized programmable electronic digital computer.
- 1965, DEC PDP-8, DEC, programmable electronic digital computer (several versions small enough to fit on a desktop).
- 1966, Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, ruggedized programmable electronic digital computer (moon landings).
- 1971, IBM System 370, IBM, programmable electronic digital computer (used writable microcode storage, introduced the first floppy disc as a method of loading this microcode storage with microinstructions when the machine was turned on).
- 1971, Intel 4004, Intel, first microprocessor available to the public.
- 1974, STAR-100, Control Data Corporation, programmable electronic digital supercomputer (vector processor).
- 1976, Cray-1, Cray Research, programmable electronic digital supercomputer (vector processor).
- 1977, DEC VAX, DEC, programmable electronic digital computer (usually considered the pinnacle of the CISC architecture machines).
Parts which make a computer are called computer components. These include CPU (central processing unit), input devices like keyboard, mouse and output devices like display or monitor, storage devices like RAM, hard disk drive etc.
- Neeraj Sharma
What were the first computers to use a stored program?
EDVAC(1946 - 52) - Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer is the first computer using the stored program concept. Programs were wired on the boards in the earlier models of computers. Dr.John Von Neumann introduced the " stored program " concept . The basic idea behind this concept is that a sequence of instructions and data can be stored in the memory of a computer for automatically directing the flow of operations .
What is the full form of cern?
CERN stands for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, which is French for "European Organization for Nuclear Research".
Since the foundation of CERN the official name was changed into "Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire"
Well typically a computer is known as "powerful" if it can perform a relatively large number of calculations in a relatively short period of time. Following this definition, the CPU would be what makes a computer powerful (assuming you ignore all the limiting factors of the other hardware).
What were the features of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine?
He invented a programable general purpose mechanical digital computer that he called the Analytical Engine in the late 1840s. However he could never get funding for it from parliament and was still arguing with his machinist over unpaid bills and specifications on his earlier never finished Difference Engine machine.
Charles Babbage is known as the father of computing.
In 1822, while at the Cambridge University in UK, Charles Babbage was critical of the navigation tables of the day. Most accidents at sea, he felt, could be avoided if estimations and guesswork could be taken out of the game. In other words, Babbage wanted "accurate tables" which led him to develop the machine known as the Difference Engine, which was powered by steam to produce highly reliable charts and tables.
Babbage approached the British government with his idea of the engine. He wanted government funding for his project, which he soon got. Most people believe that this was perhaps the first request for a computer science research.
However, Babbage soon saw the limitations of his Difference Engine, such that he decided to embark on a more ambitious project to develop a sophisticated machine for use in different scenarios. This he called the Analytical Engine. He left the project of the difference engine to itself. In 1842, seeing no results from the project, the British government decided to stop funding Babbage's engine. He was not disheartened though: he continued work on the Analytical Engine, but in 1847, he abandoned it and went back to work with the Difference Engine again! Well, at this rate, he never completed his projects during his lifetime. He did not document his work well, either.
Charles Babbage, FRS (December 26, 1791 London, England - October 18, 1871 Marylebone, London, England) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum.
In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. Nine years later, the Science Museum completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine, an astonishingly complex device for the 19th century.
Do you mean Charles Babbage?
Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was an English mathematician, mechancal engineer and inventor. He is famous for designing the "difference engine" which was a machine which would calculate mathematical tables accurately. Babbage's design was in effect a programmable mechanical computer and is the forerunner of modern electronic computers.
Who was the first person to receive credit for the internet?
Tim berners-lee In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web
What is the alphabet in binary code?
I think its something like this
{| ! width="30%" | Letter ! Binary Code | A01000001B01000010C01000011D01000100E01000101F01000110G01000111H01001000I01001001J01001010K01001011L01001100M01001101N01001110O01001111P01010000Q01010001R01010010S01010011T01010100U01010101V01010110W01010111X01011000Y01011001Z01011010
and
! width="30%" | Letter ! Binary Code | a01100001b01100010c01100011d01100100e01100101f01100110g01100111h01101000i01101001j01101010k01101011l01101100m01101101n01101110o01101111p01110000q01110001r01110010s01110011t01110100u01110101v01110110w01110111x01111000y01111001z01111010
|}
What bug did grace Murray hopper find in the univac and where did she find it?
"In 1947, Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a primitive computer).
On the 9th of September, 1947, when the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of Relay #70, in Panel F.
The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log.... The entry reads: "First actual case of bug being found."
The word went out that they had "debugged" the machine and the term "debugging a computer program" was born.
Although Grace Hopper was always careful to admit that she was not there when it actually happened, it was one of her favorite stories."
from: http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/first_computer_bug.htm, retrieved 20100729
When did Steve wozniak invent the apple?
Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak introduced the first Apple computer in 1976
Where was the inventor of the first computer?
"The Father of Computers" Charles Babbage who invented the 1st mechanical Computer.. in 1834 he dreamt of designing mechanical calculating machines."... I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society, at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep, called out, "Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?" to which I replied "I am thinking that all these tables" (pointing to the logarithms) "might be calculated by machinery. "
Cambridge, England.. is where the 1st Computer was invented by Charles Babbage. Meanwhile Ada Lovelace is credited as the "first Computer programmer" since she was writing programs -that is, manipulating symbols according to rules-for Babbages machine.
AnswerWhile it was Babbage who invented the first Computer in Cambridge, another Englishman Alan Turing the "Father of modern computer science" provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine in 1936. Of his role in the modern Computer, TimeMagazine in naming Turing one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, states.."The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine".. Source:http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/turing.html
AnswerIowa State University (Ames, Iowa) by John Vincent Atanasoff. There is some dispute as Atanasoff did not patent his digital computer, and eventually other computers came out. There was a lawsuit filed by ISU which they eventually won that establishes their campus as the "Birthplace of the electronic digital computer". AnswerCheck out the answer to "Why was the first computer made?" I've answered the question of when and where as well. Specifically, the first machine we classify as a true computer (capable of making decisions) was the ENIAC which was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1946 by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. However, much of the credit for the original design of the electronic computer is given to John Atanasoff who, together with his graduate student Clifford Berry, developed a working digital computer on the Iowa State campus between 1939 and 1942. Because of improper handling of their patent application, it took almost 50 years for them to receive full credit for their invention the ABC (Atanasoff Berry Computer). AnswerDuring World War II, "the father of modern Computer Science" Alan Turing (inventor of the Turing Machine) worked as a cryptographer, decoding codes and ciphers at one of the British government's top-secret establishments located at Bletchley Park. In January 1943, along with a number of colleagues, Turing began to construct an electronic machine to decode the Geheimfernschreiber cipher. This machine, which they dubbed COLOSSUS, comprised 1,800 vacuum tubes and was completed and working by December of the same year! By any standards COLOSSUS was one of the world's earliest working programmable electronic digital computers. But it was a special-purpose machine that was really only suited to a narrow range of tasks (for example, it was not capable of performing decimal multiplications). Having said that, although COLOSSUS was built as a special-purpose computer, it did prove flexible enough to be programmed to execute a variety of different routines. a AnswerMan first started counting on his fingers and toes...it is no coincidence that "digit" refers to body parts and numbers. Then came the first real computer...the Abacus. Designed to deal with larger numbers and a mechanical object. The Abacus is thought to have been invented by the ancient Babylonians between 1000 BC and 500 BC. AnswerComputers have been around for a very, very long time. But the definition of what makes something a computer has changed a great deal. And the progress made on developing computers was made by many many people, not just one "inventor". There are many people out there who would say that the first "computer" was the abacus, invented in Asia about 5000 years ago. But somehow I doubt that this is what you're looking for, so let's look a little more recently...As time went on, there were a number of special devices invented to help with things like tax collecting, taking the census, etc. At first, these were purely mechanical, but by the start of the twentieth century, they were run by steam.
The first of the "modern" computers was invented during World War II, in 1941 by a German engineer named Konrad Zuse. The computer was called the Z3 and was used to help design German airplanes and missiles. A couple years later, in 1943, the Allied forces developed a computer called Colossus to help decode German messages. But since the Z3 was developed by the side that lost the war and Colossus stayed a military secret for many years, these computers didn't contribute much to the ones that came next.
Independent of the Colossus project, the next computer was the Mark I, designed by Howard H. Aiken, an engineer working with Harvard and IBM. The Mark I was positively huge, taking up half of a football field, but it helped to create ballistic charts for the US Navy during the war. Shortly after this, though, came the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), developed by John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, working with the government and the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC was a lot like the Mark I, except that it ran about 1000 times faster.
Moving along, there were other computers like EDVAC (1945), UNIVAC I (1951), etc. But all these computers had something in common with the older computers - they were designed for a specific purpose and couldn't really be used for anything else. They also all worked by using vacuum tubes, which is what made them take up so much space. The invention of the transistor in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Labs made the big difference from here.
Using transistors, computers came around that could store memory and even run programs. Soon they even had computer languages so that people could change the programs run by the computer when they wanted to. After a while, the focus on computer research came to be on making them smaller, giving us the kinds of computers that we have today.
For some great resources with a lot more detailed information, check out these links:
Computers: History and Development - Lots of information starting all the way back in Asia all the way
AnswerKonrad Zuse - German - developed and built the first binary digital computer in the world, the Z1 in 1938 and in 1941 built the Z3 which was first fully functional program-controlled electromechanical digital computer in the world. Both of these machines were destroyed during WWII.the first "computer" was an abacus.. and that was like 3,000 years ago
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Who invented the electromechanical computers?
The first mechanical computing machine was invented in Greece circa 100 BC: It was used for navigation. it was called the Antikythera mechanism.
It is remains unknown as to the origins and dating of the first mechanical computers. For example by definition the Abacus is mechanical and can perform computations. It has been around and remains used for the past thousands of years. The Abacus and the archeological discovery of the Greek computer remain with unknown inventors.
Who developed the first personal computer called the Altair?
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) - an American company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The Altair was created by Ed Roberts, owner of MITS, in Albequerque, New Mexico.
Roberts asked Forrest Mims to write the manual for the Altair, but this was after Mims had left MITS.
What company produced the first computer with GUI?
Answer
Apple had its own plan to regain leadership: a sophisticated new generation of computers that would be dramatically easier to use. In 1979 Jobs had led a team of engineers to see the innovations created at the Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto (California) Research Center (PARC). There they were shown the first functional graphical user interface (GUI), featuring on-screen windows, a pointing device known as a mouse, and the use of icons, or pictures, to replace the awkward protocols required by all other computers. Apple immediately incorporated these ideas into two new computers: Lisa, released in 1983, and the lower-cost Macintosh, released in 1984. Jobs himself took over the latter project, insisting that the computer should be not merely great but "insanely great." The result was a revelation-perfectly in tune with the unconventional, science-fiction-esque television commercial that introduced the Macintosh during the broadcast of the 1984 Super Bowl-a $2,500 computer unlike any that preceded it.
Features of 1st to 5th computer generation?
First generation (1940-1956) Vaccum Tubes
Second Generation(1956-1963)Transistors
Third Generation(1964-1971)Integrated circuits
Fourth Generation(1971-present)Microprocessors
Fifth Generation (present-future) Artificial Intelligence
How did Grace Hopper's invention work?
well i am not there yet but his middle name was prob computers so he hired some nerds and they figured it out
Sorry but Grace Hopper was a woman. One of hermain contributions was in the development of early high order languages and their compilers, particularly the business language COBOL.
Who was the first lady computer programmer?
Ada Byron, or better known as Lady Lovelace, a great mathematician of her time was the first computer programmer who helped Charles Babbage in writing a plan for how the Analytical Engine (a mechanical computer) should calculate Bernoulli Numbers. When the US Department of Defence selected a single programming language that was intended to replace the many hundreds of often obscure and hard to maintain programming languages they were then using, it was named "Ada" to give her honor. (eventually both Ada and C++ were approved for use with Ada prefered and the older languages vanished slowly as weapon systems that used them were retired, replaced, or updated)
Grace Murray Hopper is often credited with being the first female programmer of electronic computers. She worked for the United States military and is considered "The Mother of Programming languages" as she developed the concept of a computer language which was independent of the computer hardware (what would be later be called a high-level language) and which led on to the development of COBOL. (FORTRAN was developed by John Backus at IBM a couple years before COBOL)
What do the letters GIGO stand for?
garbage in, garbage out.. it also a famous underware brand garbage in, garbage out garbage in, garbage out
