The History Of

Computers
By: Gabrielle Hornall
The Early Computers
The computer as we know it had its beginning
with a 19
th
century English mathematics
professor Charles Babbage.

One of the first substantial computers was
the ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator
and Calculator), which was also the first
computer to use over 2,000 vacuum tubes.

The ancestors of the computer are punch card looms and tabulating
machines.

One issue that people had with computers was the amount of energy
they used, as the computers were quite large, and required more
energy than the computers we use today. They would often overheat,
and break down.
Changing The Program
The transition from using
vacuum tubes, to using
transistors happened during
the 1950s.
Vacuum tubes took up to
much space, and needed to
be replaced often. So,
transistors were used in
place of these. Though
transistors had issues as
well, they didnt take up as
much space as vacuum
tubes.
In the 1960s, mainframe
computers became popular
with large industries, such as
the US military and space
program.
In the 1970s, personal
computers became popular,
with the release of Steve
Jobs Apple II.

First & Second
Generation
In 1937, the first electronic
digital computer was built by
Dr. John V. Atanasoff and
Clifford Berry. Computers of
this generation could only
perform a single task, and
they had no operating system.

The second generation
computers had transistors in
place of vacuum tubes. During
this generation, computers
had memory and operating
systems.
First generation






Second generation
The Third Generation, and beyond!
The first multi-use
computer, which was
first introduce in
1963.

It was much more
advanced than the
first and second
generation
computers, though
not as advanced as
the computers we use
today.


Computer Languages
The first programming languages designed to communicate instructions to
a computer were written in the 1950s.

A few of the earlier computer languages were COBOL and 4trend.

John Mauchly's Short Code, proposed in 1949, was one of the first high-
level languages ever developed for an electronic computer.

Thousands of different programming languages have been created,
mainly in the computing field.

When using a natural language to communicate with other people, human
authors and speakers can be ambiguous and make small errors, and still
expect their intent to be understood. However, figuratively speaking,
computers "do exactly what they are told to do", and cannot "understand"
what code the programmer intended to write.


The World Wide Web
And so, access was gained
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents
accessed via the internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages
that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate
between them via hyperlinks.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that would later become the
World Wide Web. Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert
Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information
of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.
Modern Day Computers
Now, computers are used for multiple thing, such as social media
and games. Whereas computers were used for calculations and
large companies early on, they are now used for our
entertainment.

When people use computers, they dont have to think about what
they are doing. With just a few clicks on a mouse, you could have
pulled up three different websites.