HISTORY OF COMPUTER It is difficult to identify any one device as the earliest computer, partly because the term computer has been subject to varying interpretations over time. Originally, the term computer referred to a person who performed numerical calculations (a human computer), often with the aid of a mechanical calculating device. The history of the modern computer begins with two separate technologies—that of automated calculation and that of programmability. Examples of early mechanical calculating devices included the abacus, the slide rule and arguably the astrolabe and the Antikythera mechanism (which dates from about 150-100 BC). Hero of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD) built a mechanical theater which performed a play lasting 10 minutes and was operated by a complex system of ropes and drums that might be considered to be a means of deciding which parts of the mechanism performed which actions and when.[3] This is the essence of programmability. Nearly all modern computers implement some form of the stored-program architecture, making it the single trait by which the word computer is now defined. While the technologies used in computers have changed dramatically since the first electronic, general-purpose computers of the 1940s, most still use the von Neumann architecture. 2. Computers using vacuum tubes as their electronic elements were in use throughout the 1950s, but by the 1960s had been largely replaced by transistor-based machines, which were smaller, faster, cheaper to produce, required less power, and were more reliable. The first transistorised computer was demonstrated at the University of Manchester in 1953.[10] In the 1970s, integrated circuit technology and the subsequent creation of microprocessors, such as the Intel 4004, further decreased size and cost and further increased speed and reliability of computers. By the 1980s, computers became sufficiently small and cheap to replace simple mechanical controls in domestic appliances such as washing machines. The 1980s also witnessed home computers and the now ubiquitous personal computer. With the evolution of the Internet, personal computers are becoming as common as the television and the telephone in the household. Modern smartphones are fully-programmable computers in their own right, in a technical sense, and as of 2009 may well be the most common form of such computers in existence.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 20:36:24 +0000
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