In terms of time, the history of computers has no clear beginning point.

By some
definitions, computing devices go back to the period of early cave men when
stones were piled together as a means of counting. The earliest computers include:

Abacus - one of the earliest computers. Slide rules - a mechanical

device, composed of a ruler with sliding insert, marked with
various number scales, which facilitates such calculations as division,
multiplication, finding roots and finding logarithms (McGraw-Hill. 1989.
Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. Third Edition).

Early Time

1621 William Oughtred - an English mathematician who invented the

first circular slide rule. This is considered the first analog computing
device.

1642 Blaise Pascal - built the first automatic calculator. His machine,
the Pascaline, was based on interlocking cogs and gears. He built 50
for sale, but clerks and accountants refused to use them for fear it
would do away with their jobs!

1673 Gottfried Leibniz - designed a new type of mechanical calculator

based on a cylinder with stepped teeth now called a Leibniz wheel. It
could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

1804 Joseph Jacguard - a Frenchman who devised a stiff card punched

with holes punched for weavers. The cards were used to let some
strands of thread pass while blocking others. The Jacguard loom is not
directly related to computers, but the idea of a punched card was later
adapted by Babbage as the first mechanical method for entering
information into a computer.

1822 Charles Babbage - completed the first difference

engine, a very large machine funded by the British
government that could solve polynomial equations. It
was so sensitive that it broke more often than not, and
a British Prime Minister declared its only purpose could
be to compute the large amount spent to build it!

Babbage later devised the analytical engine which was

designed to perform many more calculations. Although
it was never built, it included 5 features crucial to future
computers:

*an input device

*a storage facility to hold numbers for processing

*a processor or number calculator

*a control unit to direct tasks to be performed

*an output device.

1833 Augusta Ada - an amateur mathematician and close friend of

Babbage who had the idea that the analytical engine could be
programmed using a single set of cards for repeating instructions. This
is the first time the concept of computer programming was suggested.
She is considered the first computer programmer.

1886 Herman Hollerith - devised a tabulating machine that used

punched cards to count electronically. The punched cards were
sandwiched between brass rods; where there were holes in the card,
the rods made contact and completed an electrical circuit. This device
was constructed to allow the 1890 census to be tabulated. Hand
tabulation was projected to take more than a decade.

1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company. In 1924,

after several mergers and take-overs the company became
International Business Machines (IBM).

1906 The first vacuum was produced.

1936 Alan Turning - Wrote his seminal paper describing a hypothetical

digital computer, now referred to as a turning machine

Early Computers

The development of computer systems was strongly influenced by

World War II. They were desperately needed to calculate missile
trajectories, decipher codes, etc.

1939 ABC - the first digital computer. It was designed by Dr. John
Astanasoff.

1944 Mark I - the first american general purpose computer controlled

by programs. It was used at Harvard for 15 years.

1945 First "bug" - During development of the Mark II, a relay inside a
computer failed and researchers found a moth beaten to death inside
its contacts. This is thought to be the origin of the terms bug and
debugging.
1946 ENIAC - a room sized computer with 18,000 vacuum tubes.
Vacuum tubes produce a lot of heat. This system could now heat New
York City.

1945 John Von Neuman - developed the stored program concept. His
idea was to store not only the data to be processed in computer
memory, but also the instructions used to process the data. This idea is
considered to be among the most important in all of science.

Evolution of the Computer Industry

First Generation Machines

The computer industry as we know it began with the development of

the ENIAC (Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer). It was
designed by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr. at the University
of Pennsylvania from 1942 to 1945. The machine weighed 30 tons,
contained 18,000 vacuum tubes and was 100 ft x 10 ft x 3 ft in size. On
average, a tube failed every 15 minutes. Programming required 6000
switches to be set and it took 200 microseconds to add and 3
milliseconds to multiply by 3. The ENIAC was retired from service in
1955.

The Computer Age officially began on June 14, 1951 when the first
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the United
States Census Bureau. This device, developed by the Eckert-Mauchly
Computer Corp., was the first commercially available computer. The
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp was organized in 1947 and sold to
Remington-Rand shortly thereafter. On November 4, 1952, UNIVAC
predicted that Dwight D. Eisenhower would defeat Adlai E. Stevenson
in the presidential election after analyzing only five percent of the
tallied vote.

The first major computer system in North Carolina was the UNIVAC
1105, manufactured by Remington-Rand, located at the University of
North Carolina Computation Center in 1959. It cost $2,450,000
($43,000 per month) in rental. Containing 7200 vacuum tubes, it
required 3100 square feet of floor space and 35 tons of cooling. The
memory capacity was approximately 54000 bytes along with
approximately 144,000 bytes of mass storage. Simple addition
operations could be performed in 44 microseconds.

IBM, on the other hand, had been building and marketing

electromechanical punch card machines for processing large volumes
of data for 40 years before ENIAC was built. The company was hesitant
to move into the computer business up until the introduction of
UNIVAC and business decreased due the replacement of punch card
machines by the computer. The first computer produced by IBM was
the IBM 701, which was delivered to the government in 1953 and
followed shortly thereafter by the IBM 650. The company took the lead
spot in computer sales in 1956 from Remington-Rand when it sold just
76 computers.

Second Generation Computers (1958-1964)

These computers began the period of technology transfer. Popular

machines included the IBM 7090, 7070 and 1410. Other manufacturers
included Sperry-Rand, RCA, General Electric, Burroughs, Honeywell,
NCR, and Control Data. Common characteristics of these machines
included the use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes, dramatically
reducing size, implementation of assembly and high-level languages
and the removable disk pack, introduced in 1962.

Third Generation Computers (1964-1970)

These machines were dominated by the IBM 360. They were

constructed with integrated circuits (ICs). Use of these silicon
semiconductors improved reliability, size, cost and power
requirements. Machines of this type commonly employed batch
processing techniques.

Forth Generation Computers (1970--- The forth generation of

computers marks the beginning of microprocessor based machines. In
1969, Ted Hoff began work on the idea of placing all of the processing
circuits of a single computer on a single chip. His subsequent
development of this idea became the microprocessor of today. Believe
it or not, Intel, Hoff's employer had a difficult time selling the concept.
Potential buyers could not conceive of any possible applications for the
devices. Today, they are found in everything from lawn sprinkler
controls to cars to spacecraft. Their many applications have
dramatically changed our lives.

Early microcomputer efforts included Altair (the very first

microcomputer), EMCII, Tandy TRS- 80, Atari, and Commodore. Steve
Jobs and Steve Wozniak, however, changed the industry forever in
1976 when they sold a Volkswagon and a calculator to raise $1300 and
build the first apple computer. The work was done in a garage. The
system was the first major microcomputer with a keyboard and screen.
By 1983, the company they founded, Apple made the fortune 500 list.
The IBM PC was announced in 1981. It captured the top market share
over the next 18 months and became an industry standard. Today,
microcomputers like the IBM PC and the Apple MacIntosh are evolving
along with workstations into yet another generation of computer
system in which connectivity allows massive amounts of equipment
and information resources to be shared. This next generation will bring
about exciting changes in the way we work with each other and again
change our lives.