A Brief History of Computers

Pre-Mechanical Computing

 From Counting on fingers

 to hash marks in sand
 to pebbles
 to hash marks on walls
 to hash marks on bone
Mechanical computers

 From The Abacus c. 4000 BCE

 to Charles Babbage and his Difference
Engine (1812 CE)
Mechanical computers:
The Abacus (c. 4000 BCE)
Napier’s Bones and Logarithms (1617)
Oughtred’s (1621) and Schickard‘s
(1623) slide rule
Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline (1645)
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz’s
Stepped Reckoner (1674)
Joseph-Marie Jacquard and his
punched card controlled looms (1804)
Preparing the cards with the pattern
for the cloth to be woven
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
The Father of Computers
Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine
Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine
Lady Augusta Ada
Countess of Lovelace
Electro-mechanical computers

 From Herman Hollerith’s 1890 Census

Counting Machine
 to Howard Aiken and the Harvard Mark I
(1944)
Herman Hollerith and his
Census Tabulating Machine (1884)
A closer look at the Census Tabulating
Machine
The Harvard Mark I (1944) aka IBM’s Automatic
Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC)
The first computer bug
Rear Admiral Dr. Grace
Murray Hopper
Electronic digital computers

 From John Vincent Atanasoff’s 1939

Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
 to the present day
Alan Turing
1912-1954

The Turing Machine

Aka
The Universal Machine
1936
John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995)

Physics Prof
At
Iowa State
University,
Ames, IA
Clifford Berry (1918-1963)

PhD student
of
Dr. Atanasoff’s
1939
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
1943
Bletchley Park’s Colossus

The Enigma
Machine
 1946
The ENIAC

John Presper Eckert

(1919-1995)
and
John Mauchly
(1907-1980)
of the
University of
Pennsylvania Moore
School of Engineering
The ENIAC: Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Computer
Programming the ENIAC
1951
Univac
1952 – 1960
 1953 The IBM 701 becomes available to the scientific community. A
total of 19 are produced and sold.
 1954 IBM produces and markets the IBM 650. More than 1,800 of
these computers are sold in an eight-year span
 1955 Bell Labs introduces its first transistor computer. Transistors are
faster, smaller and create less heat than traditional vacuum tubs,
making these computers more reliable and efficient.
 1955 The ENIAC is turned off for the last time. It’s estimated to have
done more arithmetic than the entire human race had done prior to
1945.
 1956 IBM’s 3005 RAMAC is the first computer to be shipped with a
hard disk drive.
 1957 IBM announces it will no longer be using vacuum tubes and
releases its first computer that had 2000 transistors.
 1957 Russia launches the first artificial satellite, named sputnik.
 1958 The first integrated chip is first developed by Robert Noyce of
Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments. The first
microchip was demonstrated on September 12, 1958.
1960 – 1971
 1961 General Motors puts the first industrial robot – the 4,000 pound Unimate – to
work in a New Jersey factory.
 1963 Doug Engelbart invents and patents the first computer mouse.
 1963 The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is
developed to standardize data exchange among computers.
 1964 Dartmouth University’s John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz develop Beginner’s
All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Language (BASIC).
 1965 Ted Nelson coins the term "hypertext," which refers to text that is not
necessarily linear.
 1967 IBM creates the first floppy disk.
 1969 AT&T Bell Laboratories develop Unix.
 1969 The U.S. Department of Defense sets up the Advanced Research Projects
Agency Network (ARPANET ) this network was the first building blocks to what the
internet is today.
 1970 Intel announces the 1103, a new memory chip containing more than 1,000 bits
of information. This chip is classified as random-access memory (RAM).
 1970 Intel introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004.
 1971 The first 8" floppy diskette drive was introduced
 1971 The first laser printer is developed at Xerox PARC.
1972 – 1980
 1972 Atari releases Pong, the first commercial video game.
 1972 The compact disc is invented in the United States.
 1973 Robert Metcalfe creates the Ethernet at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC).
 1974 Intel’s improved microprocessor chip, the 8080 becomes a standard in the
microcomputing industry.
 1974 IBM develops SEQUEL, which today is known as SQL today.
 1975 MITS ships one of the first PCs, the Altair 8800 with one kilobyte (KB) of memory.
The computer is ordered as a mail-order kit for $397.00
 1975 Paul Allen and Bill Gates write the first computer language program for
personal computers, which is a form of BASIC designed for the Altair.
 1975 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs co-found Apple Computers.
 1976 The first 5.25-inch floppy disk is invented.
 1976 Microsoft introduces an improved version of BASIC.
 1976 The Intel 8086 is introduced.
 1978 The 5.25-inch floppy disk becomes an industry standard.
 1979 Texas Instruments enters the computer market with the TI 99/4 personal
computer that sells for $1,500.
 1979 Atari introduces a coin-operated version of Asteroids.
 1979 More then half a million computers are in use in the United States.
 1979 The Motorola 6800 is released and is later chosen as the processor for the
Apple Macintosh.
Modern Computer History
(1980 to the present)

1980 – 1990
1990 – 2000
2000 – present
Acknowledgements

 Bulletitems of history taken from

www.computerhope.com
 Early history based on a presentation by
Bernard John Poole, MSIS
– Associate Professor of Education and
Instructional Technology, University of Pittsburgh
at Johnstown