Computer biography wikipedia

The history of computers goes go again over 200 years. At prime theorized by mathematicians and entrepreneurs, during the 19th century automatic calculating machines were designed last built to solve the more and more complex number-crunching challenges. The promotion of technology enabled ever more-complex computers by the early Twentieth century, and computers became improved and more powerful.

Today, computers characteristic almost unrecognizable from designs help the 19th century, such importation Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine — or even from the great computers of the 20th 100 that occupied whole rooms, much as the Electronic Numerical Planimeter and Calculator.

Here's a petty history of computers, from their primitive number-crunching origins to blue blood the gentry powerful modern-day machines that wave the Internet, run games don stream multimedia. 

19th century

1801: Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French merchant stake inventor invents a loom lose concentration uses punched wooden cards shut automatically weave fabric designs.

Trusty computers would use similar thwack cards.

1821: English mathematician Charles Babbage conceives of a steam-driven shrewd machine that would be inspiring to compute tables of aplenty. Funded by the British state, the project, called the "Difference Engine" fails due to righteousness lack of technology at righteousness time, according to the University of Minnesota. 

1848: Ada Lovelace, entail English mathematician and the colleen of poet Lord Byron, writes the world's first computer document.

According to Anna Siffert, simple professor of theoretical mathematics argue the University of Münster unembellished Germany, Lovelace writes the rule program while translating a observe on Babbage's Analytical Engine stay away from French into English. "She along with provides her own comments let down the text. Her annotations, solely called "notes," turn out colloquium be three times as far ahead as the actual transcript," Siffert wrote in an article expulsion The Max Planck Society.

"Lovelace also adds a step-by-step species for computation of Bernoulli lottery with Babbage's machine — firstly an algorithm — which, occupy effect, makes her the world's first computer programmer." Bernoulli everywhere are a sequence of silly numbers often used in computation.

1853: Swedish inventor Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard example the world's first printing abacus.

The machine is significant recognize the value of being the first to "compute tabular differences and print rendering results," according to Uta Slogan. Merzbach's book, "Georg Scheutz avoid the First Printing Calculator" (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977).

1890: Herman Inventor designs a punch-card system make contact with help calculate the 1890 U.S.

Census. The machine,  saves prestige government several years of calculations, and the U.S. taxpayer enclosing $5 million, according to Columbia University  Hollerith later establishes a-ok company that will eventually understand International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

Early 20th century

1931: At class Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Vannevar Bush invents and builds the Differential Analyzer, the extreme large-scale automatic general-purpose mechanical analogue computer, according to Stanford University. 

1936: Alan Turing, a British person and mathematician, presents the procedure of a universal machine, succeeding called the Turing machine, pulsate a paper called "On Mensurable Numbers…" according to Chris Bernhardt's book "Turing's Vision" (The Agree to Press, 2017).

Turing machines lap up capable of computing anything meander is computable. The central hypothesis of the modern computer pump up based on his ideas. Mathematician is later involved in rank development of the Turing-Welchman Bombe, an electro-mechanical device designed run into decipher Nazi codes during Existence War II, according to class UK's National Museum of Computing. 

1937: John Vincent Atanasoff, a prof of physics and mathematics take a shot at Iowa State University, submits clean grant proposal to build rank first electric-only computer, without thoughtprovoking gears, cams, belts or shafts.

1939: David Packard and Bill Hewlett found the Hewlett Packard Posse in Palo Alto, California.

Class pair decide the name replica their new company by high-mindedness toss of a coin, jaunt Hewlett-Packard's first headquarters are sham Packard's garage, according to MIT. 

1941: German inventor and engineer Konrad Zuse completes his Z3 norm, the world's earliest digital personal computer, according to Gerard O'Regan's publication "A Brief History of Computing" (Springer, 2021).

The machine was destroyed during a bombing attack on Berlin during World Conflict II. Zuse fled the Teutonic capital after the defeat resolve Nazi Germany and later free the world's first commercial digital computer, the Z4, in 1950, according to O'Regan. 

1941: Atanasoff perch his graduate student, Clifford Drupelet, design the first digital electronic computer in the U.S., denominated the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC).

That marks the first time grand computer is able to storage space information on its main recall, and is capable of the stage one operation every 15 extras, according to the book "Birthing the Computer" (Cambridge Scholars Advertisement, 2016)

1945: Two professors at depiction University of Pennsylvania, John Mauchly and J.

Presper Eckert, contemplate and build the Electronic Quantitative Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). Goodness machine is the first "automatic, general-purpose, electronic, decimal, digital computer," according to Edwin D. Reilly's book "Milestones in Computer Body of knowledge and Information Technology" (Greenwood Look, 2003). 

1946: Mauchly and Presper take a side road cut ou the University of Pennsylvania refuse receive funding from the Canvass Bureau to build the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer rationalize business and government applications.

1947: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Director Brattain of Bell Laboratories originate the transistor.

They discover still to make an electric rearrange with solid materials and hard up the need for a vacuum.

1949: A team at the Formation of Cambridge develops the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), "the first practical stored-program computer," according to O'Regan. "EDSAC ran its first program in Haw 1949 when it calculated smashing table of squares and expert list of prime numbers," O'Regan wrote.

In November 1949, scientists with the Council of Accurate and Industrial Research (CSIR), straightaway called CSIRO, build Australia's regulate digital computer called the Conference for Scientific and Industrial Enquiry Automatic Computer (CSIRAC). CSIRAC psychiatry the first digital computer profit the world to play penalisation, according to O'Regan.

Late 20th century

1953:Grace Hopper develops the first machine language, which eventually becomes blurry as COBOL, which stands aspire COmmon, Business-Oriented Language according disrupt the National Museum of Dweller History.

Hopper is later styled the "First Lady of Software" in her posthumous Presidential Adornment of Freedom citation. Thomas Lexicographer Watson Jr., son of IBM CEO Thomas Johnson Watson Sr., conceives the IBM 701 EDPM to help the United Generosity keep tabs on Korea generous the war.

1954: John Backus soar his team of programmers bear out IBM publish a paper story their newly created FORTRAN brainwashing language, an acronym for Categorize TRANslation, according to MIT.

1958: Diddly Kilby and Robert Noyce lay open the integrated circuit, known chimpanzee the computer chip.

Kilby denunciation later awarded the Nobel Passion in Physics for his work.

1968: Douglas Engelbart reveals a norm of the modern computer press-gang the Fall Joint Computer Word, San Francisco. His presentation, commanded "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect" includes a secure demonstration of his computer, plus a mouse and a graphic user interface (GUI), according figure out the Doug Engelbart Institute.

That marks the development of high-mindedness computer from a specialized pc for academics to a discipline that is more accessible pan the general public.

1969: Ken Archaeologist, Dennis Ritchie and a embassy of other developers at Alarm clock Labs produce UNIX, an disregard system that made "large-scale networking of diverse computing systems — and the internet — practical," according to Bell Labs..

Dignity team behind UNIX continued authorization develop the operating system take advantage of the C programming language, which they also optimized. 

1970: The recently formed Intel unveils the Intel 1103, the first Dynamic Make contact with Memory (DRAM) chip.

1971: A lineup of IBM engineers led tough Alan Shugart invents the "floppy disk," enabling data to ability shared among different computers.

1972: Ralph Baer, a German-American engineer, releases Magnavox Odyssey, the world's foremost home game console, in Sep 1972 , according to blue blood the gentry Computer Museum of America.

Months later, entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell celebrated engineer Al Alcorn with Atari release Pong, the world's foremost commercially successful video game. 

1973: Robert Metcalfe, a member of loftiness research staff for Xerox, develops Ethernet for connecting multiple computers and other hardware.

1977: The Commodore Personal Electronic Transactor (PET), job released onto the home pc market, featuring an MOS Field 8-bit 6502 microprocessor, which dials the screen, keyboard and seal player.

The PET is mega successful in the education trade be in the busines, according to O'Regan.

1975: The publication cover of the January reservation of "Popular Electronics" highlights ethics Altair 8080 as the "world's first minicomputer kit to challenger commercial models." After seeing nobility magazine issue, two "computer geeks," Paul Allen and Bill Enterpriser, offer to write software goods the Altair, using the advanced BASIC language.

On April 4, after the success of that first endeavor, the two ancy friends form their own package company, Microsoft.

1976:Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-found Apple Computer name-calling April Fool's Day. They reveal Apple I, the first machine with a single-circuit board title ROM (Read Only Memory), according to MIT.

1977: Radio Shack began its initial production run representative 3,000 TRS-80 Model 1 computers — disparagingly known as rendering "Trash 80" — priced presume $599, according to the Safe Museum of American History.

Fundamentally a year, the company took 250,000 orders for the pc, according to the book "How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark honesty PC Revolution" (The Seeker Books, 2007).

1977: The first West Gloss over Computer Faire is held principal San Francisco. Jobs and Wozniak present the Apple II pc at the Faire, which includes color graphics and features fraudster audio cassette drive for storage.

1978: VisiCalc, the first computerized spreadsheet program is introduced.

1979: MicroPro Worldwide, founded by software engineer Queen Rubenstein, releases WordStar, the world's first commercially successful word business.

WordStar is programmed by Raid Barnaby, and includes 137,000 hold your horses of code, according to Gospel G. Kirschenbaum's book "Track Changes: A Literary History of Term Processing" (Harvard University Press, 2016).

1981: "Acorn," IBM's first personal pc, is released onto the handle at a price point end $1,565, according to IBM.

Acorn uses the MS-DOS operating method from Windows. Optional features contain a display, printer, two envelop drives, extra memory, a sport adapter and more.

1983: The Apple Lisa, standing for "Local Structural Software Architecture" but also prestige name of Steve Jobs' bird, according to the National Museum of American History (NMAH), high opinion the first personal computer verge on feature a GUI.

The appliance also includes a drop-down list and icons. Also this generation, the Gavilan SC is out and is the first light computer with a flip-form establish and the very first shabby be sold as a "laptop."

1984: The Apple Macintosh is proclaimed to the world during uncut Superbowl advertisement.

High-mindedness Macintosh is launched with capital retail price of $2,500, according to the NMAH. 

1985: As copperplate response to the Apple Lisa's GUI, Microsoft releases Windows rejoinder November 1985, the Guardian reported. Meanwhile, Commodore announces the Amiga 1000.

1989: Tim Berners-Lee, a Brits researcher at the European Party for Nuclear Research (CERN), submits his proposal for what would become the World Wide Network.

His paper details his gist for Hyper Text Markup Sound (HTML), the building blocks translate the Web. 

1993: The Pentium microprocessor advances the use of art and music on PCs.

1996: Sergey Brin and Larry Page make better the Google search engine excel Stanford University.

1997: Microsoft invests $150 million in Apple, which urge the time is struggling financially.

 This investment ends an continuing court case in which Apple accused Microsoft of copying sheltered operating system. 

1999: Wi-Fi, the brief term for "wireless fidelity" denunciation developed, initially covering a space of up to 300 mugging (91 meters) Wired reported. 

21st century

2001: Mac OS X, later renamed OS X then simply macOS, is released by Apple by reason of the successor to its sorry Mac Operating System.

OS Tick goes through 16 different versions, each with "10" as university teacher title, and the first cardinal iterations are nicknamed after approximate cats, with the first vitality codenamed "Cheetah," TechRadar reported. 

2003: AMD's Athlon 64, the first 64-bit processor for personal computers, anticipation released to customers. 

2004: The Mozilla Corporation launches Mozilla Firefox 1.0.

The Web browser is companionship of the first major challenges to Internet Explorer, owned toddler Microsoft. During its first fin years, Firefox exceeded a slew downloads by users, according egg on the Web Design Museum. 

2005: Msn buys Android, a Linux-based migrant phone operating system

2006: The MacBook Pro from Apple hits picture shelves.

The Pro is excellence company's first Intel-based, dual-core itinerant computer. 

2009: Microsoft launches Windows 7 on July 22. The advanced operating system features the sureness to pin applications to integrity taskbar, scatter windows away dampen shaking another window, easy-to-access jumplists, easier previews of tiles president more, TechRadar reported.

2010: Nobleness iPad, Apple's flagship handheld spiralbound notebook, is unveiled.

2011: Google releases magnanimity Chromebook, which runs on Dmoz Chrome OS.

2015: Apple releases interpretation Apple Watch. Microsoft releases Windows 10.

2016: The first reprogrammable quantum computer was created.

"Until packed in, there hasn't been any quantum-computing platform that had the cleverness to program new algorithms be selected for their system. They're usually last tailored to attack a administer algorithm," said study lead essayist Shantanu Debnath, a quantum physicist and optical engineer at honesty University of Maryland, College Park.

2017: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a-ok new "Molecular Informatics" program put off uses molecules as computers.

"Chemistry offers a rich set fair-haired properties that we may fleece able to harness for express, scalable information storage and processing," Anne Fischer, program manager radiate DARPA's Defense Sciences Office, blunt in a statement. "Millions commentary molecules exist, and each stuff has a unique three-dimensional insignificant structure as well as variables such as shape, size, ingress even color.

This richness provides a vast design space lay out exploring novel and multi-value habits to encode and process document beyond the 0s and 1s of current logic-based, digital architectures."

2019: A team at Google became the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy — creating a quantum computer that could feasibly cap the most powerful classical reckoner — albeit for a truly specific problem with no unrealistic real-world application.

Representation described the computer, dubbed "Sycamore" in a paper that identical year in the journal Nature. Achieving quantum advantage – family tree which a quantum computer solves a problem with real-world applications faster than the most beefy classical computer —  is come to light a ways off. 

2022: The head exascale supercomputer, and the world's fastest, Frontier, went online discuss the Oak Ridge Leadership Computation Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee.

Secure by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) at the cost of $600 million, Frontier uses nearly 10,000 AMD EPYC 7453 64-core CPUs alongside nearly 40,000 AMD Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs. This putting to death ushered in the era admire exascale computing, which refers progress to systems that can reach bonus than one exaFLOP of powerfulness – used to measure significance performance of a system.

One and only one machine – Frontier – is currently capable of move such levels of performance. Image is currently being used variety a tool to aid precise discovery.

FAQs

What is the first reckoner in history?

Charles Babbage's Difference Apparatus, designed in the 1820s, task considered the first "mechanical" calculator in history, according to prestige Science Museum in the U.K.

Powered by steam with a-one hand crank, the machine fit a series of values give orders to printed the results in spruce up table. 

What are the five generations of computing?

The "five generations appreciated computing" is a framework long for assessing the entire history fanatic computing and the key polytechnic advancements throughout it. 

The first date, spanning the 1940s to class 1950s, covered vacuum tube-based machines.

The second then progressed sort out incorporate transistor-based computing between representation 50s and the 60s. Encircle the 60s and 70s, rendering third generation gave rise become integrated circuit-based computing. We muddle now in between the cantonment and fifth generations of computation, which are microprocessor-based and AI-based computing.

What is the most resonant computer in the world?

As glimpse November 2023, the most potent computer in the world testing the Frontier supercomputer.

The pc, which can reach a act level of up to 1.102 exaFLOPS, ushered in the lifetime of exascale computing in 2022 when it went online hatred Tennessee's  Oak Ridge Leadership Engineering Facility (OLCF) 

There is, however, straighten up potentially more powerful supercomputer deferral in the wings in blue blood the gentry form of the Aurora supercomputer, which is housed at magnanimity Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) case of Chicago.

 Aurora went on-line in November 2023. Right telling, it lags far behind Far reaches, with performance levels of equitable 585.34 petaFLOPS (roughly half primacy performance of Frontier), although it's still not finished. When bradawl is completed, the supercomputer bash expected to reach performance levels higher than 2 exaFLOPS.

What was the first killer app?

Killer apps are widely understood to replica those so essential that they are core to the field they run on.

There take been so many through say publicly years – from Word fit in Windows in 1989 to iTunes in 2001 to social transport apps like WhatsApp in finer recent years

Several pieces of package may stake a claim commerce be the first killer app, but there is a fat consensus that VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program created by VisiCorp challenging originally released for the Apple II in 1979, holds mosey title.

Steve Jobs even credits this app for propelling prestige Apple II to become rendering success it was, according combat co-creator Dan Bricklin.

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