Evolution of the Computer:

The first counting device was the abacus, originally from Asia. 1642: Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and philosopher, invents the first mechanical digital calculator using gears, called the Pascaline. It was able to perform addition and subtraction of whole numbers. 1812: Charles P. Babbage, the "father of the computer", discovered that many long calculations involved many similar, repeated operations. Therefore, he designed a machine, the difference engine which would be steam-powered, fully automatic and commanded by a fixed instruction program. 1840s: Augusta Ada. "The first programmer" suggested that a binary system should be used for storage rather than a decimal system. 1850s: George Boole developed Boolean logic which would later be used in the design of computer circuitry. 1906: The vacuum tube is invented by American physicist Lee De Forest. 1939: Dr. John V. Atanasoff and his assistant Clifford Berry build the first electronic digital computer. Their machine, the Atanasoff-Berry-Computer (ABC) provided the foundation for the advances in electronic digital computers. 1941, Konrad Zuse from Germany, introduced the first programmable computer designed to solve complex engineering equations. This machine, called the Z3, was also the first to work on the binary system instead of the decimal system.

(1)American physicist John Mauchly proposed the electronic digital computer called ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. He helped build it along with American engineer John Presper Eckert, Jr., at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. ENIAC was operational in 1945 and introduced to the public in 1946. It is regarded as the first successful, general digital computer. It occupied 167 sq m (1,800 sq ft), weighed more than 27,000 kg (60,000 lb), punch card input and contained more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Roughly 2,000 of the computers vacuum tubes were replaced each month by a team of six technicians. Many of ENIACs first tasks were for military purposes, such as calculating ballistic firing tables and designing atomic weapons. Since ENIAC was initially not a stored program machine, it had to be reprogrammed for each task.

(2)At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, HungarianAmerican mathematician John von Neumann developed one of the first computers used to solve problems in mathematics, meteorology, economics, and

hydrodynamics. Von Neumann's 1945 design for the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) was the first electronic computer design to incorporate a program stored entirely within its memory. This machine led to several others, some with clever names like ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, and MANIAC.

The First Generation (1951-1959)

1951: Mauchly and Eckert built the UNIVAC I, the first computer designed and sold commercially, specifically for business data-processing applications. 1950s: Dr. Grace Murray Hopper developed the UNIVAC I compiler. 1957: The programming language FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was designed by John Backus, an IBM engineer. 1959: Jack St. Clair Kilby and Robert Noyce of Texas Instruments manufactured the first integrated circuit, or chip, which is a collection of tiny little transistors.

The Second Generation (1959-1965)

1960s: Gene Amdahl designed the IBM System/360 series of mainframe (G) computers, the first general-purpose digital computers to use intergrated circuits. 1961: Dr. Hopper was instrumental in developing the COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) programming language. 1963: Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, produced the PDP-I, the first minicomputer (G). 1965: BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language developped by Dr. Thomas Kurtz and Dr. John Kemeny.

The Third Generation (1965-1971)

1969: The Internet is started. 1970: Dr. Ted Hoff developed the famous Intel 4004 microprocessor (G) chip. 1971: Intel released the first microprocessor, a specialized integrated circuit which was ale to process four bits of data at a time. It also included its own arithmetic logic unit. PASCAL, a structured programming language, was developed by Niklaus Wirth.

The Fourth Generation (1971-Present)

1975: Ed Roberts, the "father of the microcomputer" designed the first microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which was produced by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). The same year, two young hackers, William Gates and Paul Allen approached MITS and promised to deliver a BASIC compiler. So they did and from the sale, Microsoft was born. 1976: Cray developed the Cray-I supercomputer (G). 1977: Jobs and Wozniak designed and built the first Apple II microcomputer. 1981: The IBM PC was introduced with a 16-bit microprocessor. 1984: Apple introduced the Macintosh computer, which incorporated a unique graphical interface, making it easy to use. The same year 1986: Compaq released the DeskPro 386 computer, the first to use the 80036 microprocessor.

1993: Several companies introduced computer systems using the Pentium microprocessor from Intel that contains 3.1 million transistors and is able to perform 112 million instructions per second (MIPS).

UNIVAC, (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), the first electronic computer designed and sold to solve commercial problems. The UNIVAC contained about 5000 vacuum tubes, occupied 943 cubic feet, and weighed 8 tons. The UNIVAC was a successor to the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator). The UNIVAC contained many improvements over the earlier ENIAC. The number of vacuum tubes in the UNIVAC was reduced to about 5000 from ENIACs 19,000. UNIVACs 943 cubic feet of cabinets took up less floor space than ENIAC, but it still would have filled a single-car garage. The UNIVAC weighed 8 tons instead of the ENIACs 30 tons, and it consumed about 100 kilowatts of power instead of the 175 kilowatts of power that the ENIAC used. Despite the major improvements of the UNIVAC over the ENIAC, it was still extremely inefficient by todays standards. UNIVACs memory, holding both the data and program, was built from mercury delayline tubes. These large horizontal cylinders contained liquid mercury that circulated acoustic vibrations representing stored data and instruction values. Each memory line could accommodate 1024 words, with each word holding one 12-digit data value or two 6-digit instruction values. External data could be read from and written to magnetic tape, as well as from punch cards and to printers. The UNIVAC could perform up to 1905 operations per second. Primarily designed for business applications, the UNIVAC worked well with both fixed-precision decimal digits and text character data.