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History of Computer:
To think that computers have suddenly arrived on the scene would be wrong, although it is true
that their number and use have greatly increased during recent years. Desk calculators have been
in use for a very long time, and even in the days of the old navigators and astronomers there was
a need for some sort of calculating instrument to relieve the human brain of work.
The history of the computer owes its existence to the fact that people, who are lazy by nature,
have always sought to improve their ability to calculate, in order to reduce errors and save time.
add
subtract
multiply
divide
By 1885, they were being built with keyboards for entering data. Electrical motors quickly
supplanted cranks.
Programmable computers
In 1938, Konrad Zuse invented a computer based around electromechanical relays: The Z3. This
computer was the first to use binary instead of decimals
In 1937, Howard Aiken developed a programmable computer 17 metres long and 2.5 metres
high, which could calculate 5 times faster than a human.
It was IBM's Mark I.
It was built using 3300 gears and 1400 switches linked with 800 km of electrical wiring.
In 1947, the Mark II appeared, with its predecessor's gears being replaced by electronic
components.
The transistor
In 1948, the transistor was created by the firm Bell Labs (thanks to the work of the engineers
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley). With transistors, the computers of the
1950s could be made less bulky, less energy-hungry, and therefore less expensive: This marked a
turning point in computing history.
Microcomputers
In 1971, the first microcomputer came out: the Kenback 1, with a 256-byte memory.
Microprocessors
In 1971, the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appeared. It could carry out 4 bits of operations
at once.
Around the same time, Hewlett Packard put out the HP-35 calculator.
The Intel 8008 processor (which could process 8 bits at a time) was released in 1972.
In 1973, The Intel 8080 processor was used in the first microcomputers: the Micral and the
Altair 8800, with 256 bytes of memory. In late 1973, Intel came out with processors that were
already 10 times faster than their predecessor (the Intel 8080) and included 64 Kb of memory.
In 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created the Apple I in a garage. This computer had a
keyboard, a 1 MHz microprocessor, 4 Kb of RAM and 1 KB of video memory.
The story goes that the two friends didn't know what to name the computer; Steve Jobs, seeing
an apple tree in the garden, decided he would call the computer "apple" if he couldn't think up
another name in the next five minutes.
In 1981, IBM sold the first "PC", made from an 8088 processor with a clock speed of 4.77 MHz.
Computers today
It is very difficult today to tell where computers are going. Their development has followed
Moore's Law: "Every three years, four times as many transistors can be put on a chip."
This would imply that there will be 1 billion transistors on a chip around the year 2010.