History of Computers
Computers were initially large machines that could fill entire rooms. Some were operated using large vacuum tubes that formed the basis of today's transistors.In order to operate such machines, punch cards were used. One of the first such examples of this was the Jacquard Loom.
In 1833 Charles Babbage invented his difference engine, an early calculator.
Together with the punch card design, he created the analytical engine.
Here are some computers that came and went in the history of computing.
ENIAC
A behemoth of a machine weighing 27 tones, ENIAC stood for Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer.
- It was originally used to perform calculations for the hydrogen bomb, and later saw use in calculating artillery firing tables.
- Working out the programming on paper took weeks, and performing the necessary wiring took days. The ENIAC saw service until October 2, 1955.
® Macintosh
- First introduced by Apple in 1984, the Macintosh was the first computer to use a mouse and graphical user interface (GUI) rather than a command line interface.
- However due to the immense cost of porting command line interface programs to the GUI, software development was initially slow.
- In this computer maintained as the basis level of the computer.
- IBM PC
- The father of all current personal computers, the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.
- It was capable of running 3 different operating systems at launch, the most popular being PC DOS.
The IBM PC introduced the concept of the BIOS (Basic Input Output System), which was proprietary at the time, although it now has been reverse-engineered and is considered the de facto standard in firmware interfacing. Because of its success, many manufacturers were encouraged to create clones with the same feature set as the PC, which we use today as our computers.
