History of Computers

The computer was born not for entertainment or email but out of a need to solve a serious numbercrunching crisis. By 1880 the U.S. population had grown so large that it took more than seven years
to tabulate the U.S. Census results. The government sought a faster way to get the job done, giving
rise to punch-card based computers that took up entire rooms.
1.) First Generation Computers (1951 1959)
a. Electromagnetic Relays
b. Vacumm Tubes
c. Hard UNIVAC
d. Atanasoff-Berry Computer

The first
substantial
computer was
the giant ENIAC
machine by
John W.
Mauchly and J.
Presper Eckert
at the University
of Pennsylvania.
ENIAC
(Electrical
Numerical
Integrator and
Calculator) used
a word of 10 decimal digits
instead of binary ones like
previous automated
calculators/computers.
ENIAC was also the first
machine to use more than
2,000 vacuum tubes, using
nearly 18,000 vacuum
tubes. Storage of all those vacuum tubes and the machinery required to keep the cool took up over
167 square meters (1800 square feet) of floor space. Nonetheless, it had punched-card input and
output and arithmetically had 1 multiplier, 1 divider-square rooter, and 20 adders employing decimal
"ring counters," which served as adders and also as quick-access (0.0002 seconds) read-write
register storage.
2.) Second Generation Computers (1965-197
a. Transistors

transistor computer uses

discrete transistors instead of

vacuum tubes. The "first generation" of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated
large amounts of heat, were bulky, and were unreliable. A "second generation" of computers, through
the late 1950s and 1960s featured boards filled with individual transistors and magnetic memory
cores. These machines remained the mainstream design into the late 1960s, when integrated circuits
started appearing and led to the "third generation" machines.
The University of Manchester's experimental Transistor Computer was first operational in November
1953 and it is widely believed to be the first transistor computer to come into operation anywhere in
the world. There were two versions of the Transistor Computer, the prototype, operational in 1953,
and the full-size version, commissioned in April 1955.