-The discovery of ways to harness electricity was the key advance made during this period. Knowledge and information could now be converted into electrical impulses.
The first electric battery, known as the Voltaire pile was invented in 8th century by Alessandro Volta.
Voltaic files consisted of a stack of alternating discs of zinc and copper or silver separated by felt soaked in brine. They provided, for the first time, a simple source of stored electrical energy that didn’t rely on mechanical means.
Samuel F.J. Morse conceived of his version of an electromagnetic telegraph in 1832 and constructed an experiment version in 1815.
He did not construct a truly practical system until 1844, when he built a line from Baltimore to Washington.
•Developed the first working telephone and transmitted his now famous quotation “Watson, come here, I want you.”
•His telephone was introduced on a large scale at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1877.
•Followed by the discovery that electrical waves travel through space and can produce an effect far from the point at which they originated by Guglielmo Marconi in 1894
•These two events led to the invention of the radio
•1852-George Boole develops binary algebra. This became known as Boolean algebra andbecame important in the 20th century when binary computers were developed.
Felt’s Comptograph, containing built-in printer, is introduced.
- Herman Hollerith was the first person to successfully use punched cards in 1890.
- Punched Card was adapted for use in early computers and provided computer programmers with a new way to put information into their machine.
- Until only two decades ago, the punched card was the most popular method for entering data into computers.
- By the 19th century, the number of people in the United States was so large, it took seven years to count them all.
- Seeking to shorten that time, the Census Bureau held a contest to find the fastest adding machine.
- Hollerith won the contest with his punched card device and his invention helped to complete the 1
- Hollerith was the father of information processing and found the Tabulating machine Company which later became the Computer Tabulating Recording Company.
890 census in just two and one-half years. - Hollerith company went to become the International Business Machines Corporation known today as IBM.
1893
The Millionaire, the first efficeint four-function calculator invented by Otto shweiger, a Swiss Engineer.
1906
- With the groundwork laid by people such as Pascal, Babbage and Hollerith, innovators began working toward modern computers.
- It was during the early 2oth century computers changed from mechanical calculation machines to electronic computers.
- Vacuum tube was developed by Lee De Forest which provide electricity controlled switch, a necessity for digital electronic computers.
- Vacuum tubes look similar to light bulbs.
- It were the first major electrical part of a computer, replacing manual switches.
- After the introduction of the vacuum tube, there were no longer problems with mechanical gears, pulleys or levers.
It marked the end of mechanical computing and the beginnings of electronics in computer.
ELECTRICAL AGE
•In 1941, Konrad Zuse built the first programmable computer called Z3. A computer is “programmable” because it is capable of following instructions.
• Z3 is designed to solve engineering equations rather than basic arithmetic problems.
•Z3 was the first fully functional, program controlled (freely programmable) computer of the world. The Z3 was presented on May 12, 1941 to an audience of scientists in Berlin. The demonstration was a success.
1942
•Howard Aiken a PhD student of Harvard University built the Mark I “ The First Stored Program Computer”
•8 feet tall, 51 feet long, 2 feet thick, weight 5 tons, used about 750, 000 parts, 500 miles of wires, 3-5 seconds per calculation.
•In 1942, John Atanasoff and Clifford berry completed the first all-electronic computer the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry computer).
•ABC was the first computer to use electricity in the form of vacuum tubes to make electric computation possible.
•ABC was used for solving complex system of equations.
GENERATIONS OF COMPUTERS
FIRST GENERATION(1951-1958)
The first generation of computers used vacuum tubes as their main logic elements; punched cards to input and externally store data; and rotating magnetic drums for internal storage of data in programs written in machine language (instructions written as a string of 0s and 1s) or assembly language (a language that allowed the programmer to write instructions in a kind of shorthand that would then be "translated" by another program called a compiler into machine language).
In addition, first-generation computers often broke down because of burned-out vacuum tubes. First generation computers also needed many experts to operate them.
In 1945, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly developed the first operational electronic digital computer, called ENIAC, for US Army. ENIAC was over 1000 times faster than Mark 1, and could perform 5000 additions per second. ENIAC had more than 1800 vacuum tubes, and took up to 1800 square feet of space. In addition, the electrical current ENIAC required could power more than a thousand modern computers. Today, ENIAC’s technology could fit in a modern wristwatch. In 1951 the UNIVAC-1 became the first commercially available electronic computer. This computer was designed by Eckert and Mauchly (the designers of the ENIAC) and built by the Remington Rand corporation. The first of these computers was delivered to US. Census Bureau.
Between 1951 and 1953 magnetic core memory was developed. This memory consists of tiny ferrite “donuts” that were arranged on a lattice of wires. The polarity of their magnetization could be change or detected by passing current through the wires. This allowed each lattice point store one “bit” – either 0 or 1. Magnetic core memory was the fastest type of memory until the late 1980’s.
SECOND GENERATION(1959-1963)
In the 1940s, discovered that a class of crystalline mineral materials called semiconductors could be used in the design of a device called a transistor to replace vacuum tubes. Magnetic cores (very small donut-shaped magnets that could be polarized in one of two directions to represent data) strung on wire within the computer became the primary internal storage technology. Magnetic tape and disks began to replace punched cards as external storage devices.
High-level programming languages (program instructions that could be written with simple words and mathematical expressions), like FORTRAN and COBOL, made computers more accessible to scientists and businesses.
Instead of vacuum tubes, second generation computers used transistors an exiting new invention at the time. John Barden, Walter Brattain and William Shockley of Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the transistor. A transistor is a small, solid-state component designed to monitor the flow of the electric current.
THIRD GENERATION( 1963-1974)
•Individual transistors were replace by integrated circuits.
•Magnetic tape and disks completely replace punch cards.
•Magnetic core internal memories began to give way to new form, metal-oxide semiconductor.
In the third generation, computers relied on a new technology called the integrated circuits. The integrated circuit is a single wafer or chip that can hold many transistors and electronic circuits.
FOURTH GENERATION (1979-Present)
•Intel Corporation designed the first tiny computer on a chip, it was called the microprocessor.
•Microprocessor is an integrated circuit built on a tiny piece of silicon.
•Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems or MITS produced the first PC. They named the computer kit Altair 8080, after the Star Trek episode, “A Voyage to Altair” in 1975.
•Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded
the Microsoft.
•In April 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded APPLE COMPUTERS.
•VisiCalc is released. This is the first spreadsheet program and it made microcomputers useful to business in 1978.
•The first microcomputer word processor, Word Star, is released in 1979.
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