HISTORY OF COMPUTERS

Article By : Saima Tauheed 

One of the initial machines created to support people in calculations was the abacus which is yet being done some 5000 years behind its discovery.

ABACUS

In 1642 the adding machine based on mechanical gears in which numbers were designed with the cogs on the wheels developed by Blaise Pascal a brilliant French mathematician.

Pascals Computer

Englishman, Charles Babbage, invented the "Difference Engine" in the 1830s built out of brass and pewter rods and gears, and He also produced an additional device which he called an "Analytical Engine".

Babbage's Difference Engine

Augusta Ada Byron was an assistant of Babbage He was identified as the first computer programmer.
An American, Herman Hollerith, developed the first electrically driven device in 1890. In which metal rods and punched cards were utilized.
In 1943, named Colossus developed a series of vacuum tubebased computers.

Colossus Vacum Tube Computer

In the late 1940's the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) developed by John von Neumann.He was a consultant of the ENIAC team.  This enabled programs to be read inside the computer and so provided background to the age of general-purpose computers.

EDVAC COMPUTERS

Computers are divided into five generations.

The Generations of Computers

It practiced being very familiar to refer to computers as referring to one of various "generations" of the computer. These generations are: -

The First Generation (1943-1958): This generation is often defined as beginning with the presentation of the first commercial computer to a business customer.

The Second Generation (1959-1964): In the mid-1950s produced the transistor by Bell Labs. Transistors were able of producing many of the related responsibilities as vacuum tubes the different main development of this period was the evolution of computer languages.

1-Assembler languages or symbolic languages

2-Higher level languages

The Third Generation (1965-1970): In 1965 the first integrated circuit (IC) was formed in which whole circuits of hundreds of parts were capable to be installed on a single silicon chip 2- or 3-mm square. Computers utilizing these IC's quickly displaced transistor-based machines.

The Fourth Generation (1971-present): Most of the progress since the mid-1960s can be viewed as a component of a continuum of gradual miniaturization. In 1970 large-scale integration was realized wherever the equivalent of thousands of integrated circuits was compressed over a single silicon chip.

The Fifth Generation (the future): The "fifth generation" of computers were established through the Japanese government in 1980 when they revealed a positive ten-year strategy to build the next generation of computers.