A Brief History of Computers

3000 B.C.The abacus was invented and used

forquick, manual addition and

subtractioncalculations.

Abacus

1645 A.D.A mechanical adding and

subtractingmachine called the Pascaline (after

itsinventor, the French mathematicianBlaise Pascal) was invented.

Pascaline

1830Charles Babbage, the father ofcomputers, designed the first

electroniccomputer called the difference

engine.Unfortunately, the difference engine

wasnever actually built, but today’scomputers are based on it.

Difference Engine

1890The 1890 census was predicted to

be sovast that people-power alone could

nottabulate it. Therefore, an inventornamed Herman Hollerith invented

thepunch card. Census data was

punchedonto these cards , and tabulatingmachines computed the totals.

Punch Cards

Tabulating Machine

1937An electromechanical calculator wasbuilt with the help of IBM. Although

nottruly an electronic computer because

allits parts were mechanical and moving,the Mark I computer (as it was named)proved the theory of computingmachines could be a reality and not justa theory.

Mark I computer

1939The first vacuum tube calculating

machinewas invented.

1946The first true general-purpose

vacuum-tube,first-generation computer, named

ENIAC,was invented.

ENIAC

1957FORTRAN, one of the oldestprogramming languages still in usetoday, was developed toaid scientific and mathematicalprogrammers.

1959The second-generation computers

came on thescene.

1960COBOL was developed to give

businessprogrammers the language they

neededto write programs.

1964The first version of BASIC, the mostimportant language for start-upprogrammers was written.

1965The third-generation computers

wereperfected.

1976BASIC was ported to the earlymicrocomputers by Microsoft, a

companyformed and run by two teenagers

out oftheir garage, (one of these guys

was BillGates)

1976 - 1978Two of the most importantmicrocomputers that started the

truetrend of home computing, the Applecomputer and Radio Shack’s TRS-

80were invented.

1981The introduction of IBM’s firstmicrocomputer, the IBM PC, finally

addedstability to microcomputers.

1982The American National StandardsInstitute (ANSI) agreed to a

universallyaccepted standard for the Cprogramming language.C would prove to be the most

importantlanguage of the 1980’s.

1984The Windows operating system

beganspurring interest

1989The C++ programming language

wasmade available for a wide variety ofmicrocomputers, helping to

spearheadthe object-oriented programming

(OOP)movement.

1990Visual Basic began taking shape toprovide Windows programming

skillswithout requiring huge investments

intime.

1995Windows 95 and Windows NT

becamethe dominate operating systems of

PC’sand server computers.