A Brief History of

Computers

Pre-Mechanical Computing:
From Counting on fingers
to pebbles
to hash marks on walls
to hash marks on bone
to hash marks in sand

Mechanical computers
From
The Abacus
c. 4000 BCE
to

Charles Babbage
and his Difference Engine (1812)

Mechanical computers:
The Abacus (c. 3000 BCE)

Napier's Bones

Slide Rule

Calculating Clock

Pascaline

Stepped Reckoner

Jacquards Loom

Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

The Father of Computers

Difference Engine

Charles Babbages Analytical Engine

Lady Augusta Ada

Countless of Lovelace

Electro-mechanical computers
or The First Generation Computers
From
Herman Holleriths

1890
Census Counting Machine
to

Howard Aiken
and the Harvard Mark I (1944)

Herman Hollerith and his

Census Tabulating Machine (1884)

The Harvard Mark I (1944)

aka IBMs Automatic Sequence
Controlled Calculator (ASCC)

The first computer bug

Electronic digital computers

From
John Vincent Atanasoffs
1939
Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
to
the present day

Alan Turing
The Turing Machine

Aka
The Universal Machine
1936

First Generation Computers

The first electronic computer was designed at Iowa State
between 1939-1942

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer used the binary

system(1s and 0s).

Contained vacuum tubes and stored numbers for

calculations by burning holes in paper

Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC)

1943
Bletchley Parks Colossus

The Enigma
Machine

ENIAC

Problems with the ENIAC

The ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes to hold a charge
Vacuum tubes were so notoriously unreliable that even twenty
years later many neighborhood drug stores provided a "tube tester"

ENIACs Wiring

John Von Neumann

Edvac

Second Generation Computers

Vacuum Tubes

Transistors

Univac

Third Generation Computers

Fourth Generation Computers