INDIVIDUAL PROJECT:

TOPIC: Historical Development of Computers

Computers of Yesterday and Today

      I know the first thing you do after you wake up every morning: it is to check your phones, go online and check your social media accounts. The computer truly has become a big part of each of our lives.

      The term computer which is a machine, an electronic device that executes the instructions in a program, is very different from its former meaning. The computer was defined as a job title specially for the women. From manual down to hi-tech, from the size of the room to pocket-suzed, a lot of developments happened with computers. It has played a big part in the lives of people and has become a catalyst of change in society then and now. But a long time passed before the computers became as high tech as they are now.

      During the Pre-Mechanical Era (3000 B.C.- 1450 A.D.), different writing tools, letters and numbers, and even the first books and libraries were created. Phoenicians created symbols that expressed single syllables and consonants while Greeks added vowels and Romans gave letters their Latin names creating the alphabets we use today. The Egyptians came to develop paper from papyrus plants and the Sumerians for the stylus that could scratch marks on wet clay. Mesopotamian priests kept the earliest books, Egyptians kept scrolls and Greeks were the first ones to bind papyrus leaves to turn it into books. The Egyptians were the first to develop the first numbering system and the Arab developed the concept of zero. 

      A lot of inventions were invented during the Mechanical Era (1450-1850). There came the first movable metal-type printing process by Johan Gutenburg of Germany, 1450. John Napier created the first general-purpose computer, the Napier’s Bone, which enables users to multiply and divide and even get square roots and cube roots, and the Slide Rule which was used by William Oughtred and the NASA engineers of Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programs that landed men on the moon. Charles Babbage, the father of the modern computer, invented the Difference Engine (1822), a steam driven calculating machine about the size of a room which was able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. It was never completed so he devised the Analytic Machine. Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace Baron was known to be the first computer programmer. The beginning of telecommunication also arose during this era. Voltaic cell, Morse code and Telegraph, telephone and even radio were created during this era. Also, George Boole developed binary algebra which is known as Booleian Logic and became vital to the invention of binary computers during the 20th century.

      The so-called electromechanical era, 1840 to 1940, was marked by the development of computers. It paved the way for Pehr and Edvar Scheutz to create the Tabulating Machine which was capable of processing fifteen-digit numbers, printing out results and rounding off to eight digits. Another invention of this time was the Hollerith desk, consisting of a card reader which sensed to the holes in cards, a gear -driven mechanism which could count and display the results of the count. Herman Hollerith’s success made him the “father of information processing”. He founded the Tabulating Machine Company which later became the Computer Tabulating Reading Company and retired in 1921. His company later became the IBM Corporation of today. One of the most important inventions of that time was the Vacuum tubes by Lee de Forest. It was the first major electrical part of the computer replacing manual switches. 

 Onto the fourth era, 1941 down to the present. Howard Aiken developed Harvard Mark I in 1942 which was the first stored-program computer and the first programmable digital computer made in the U.S.  But it was not a purely electronic computer for it was constructed out of switches relays, rotating shafts and clutches. The first computer bug was seen in this computer. It was Grace Hopper who saw a dead moth which hindered the reading of the punched cards, thus she coined the term Computer bug, referring to computer problems, and Debugging, meaning to eliminate problems. Also, she invented the first high-level language, “Flow-matic”, which later became COBOL. Another invention was the Colossus- built during World War II by Britain in order to break cryptographic codes used by Germany. Through the invention of transistors, computers became smaller. Magnetic tape disks also replaced punched cards as external storage devicesr. During the 1960’s, computers became less expensive for transistors were replaced by the integrated circuit thanks to Jack Kilby. The birth of microprocessors also led to the PC, and Altair 8800m was the first ever personal computer to be produced. Amiga was then the first multimedia computer with advanced graphics.

      Through the inventions of different inventors and the brilliant minds to grace thr computer's history, life was made easier for the people of the present times and of the next generations. We are now able to access all sorts of information with just one click on our computers provided that it has an internet connection. With these developments, we are now also capable of developing better products and conduct research with the aid of these devices. Computers also shorten distances for we can now interact with our family and friends in the other parts of the globe as if they were just in front of us. Though we are given comfort by these devices, let us not forget our traditions, the value of being industrious, and the fact that abusing this technology has great consequences on the human race and on the Earth.

SOURCES:

http://www.dia.eui.upm.es/asignatu/sis_op1/comp_hd/comp_hd.htm

http://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

http://people.bu.edu/baws/brief%20computer%20history.html

http://wikieducator.org/History_of_Computer_Development

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware

http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=cmptr