History of Computers - Online Education

In this article we will discuss only about the History of Computers. Today we all are using computer for some or the other purpose and computer has become a very important part of our life. As of date we know that computers have evolved like anything, but what most of us do not know is, from where all it started from. So let us discuss about the history of computers.

Father of Computers.

Charles Babbage is known as the father of computers. It is he who had developed and designed the first computer. The design made by Charles Babbage was known as Analytical Engine and was developed during the early 19th century. but even today the basic frame work of our modern day computers are still based on the same design.

Since then computers went on developing and we can classify this developing stages as generations. Till date there are four generations of computer known to man kind and we expect to see the fifth generation very soon.

Generations of Computer.

First Generation: Dr. John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, made the first electronic digital computer in the year 1937 and named it Atanasoff Berry Computer abbreviated as ABC.

Then in 1943, a computer named Colossus was built for the use of military.

The first digital computer for general purpose use was made in the year 1946 and was known as Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or ENIAC. It was a huge monstrous computer which had a very high consumption of electricity.

It had 18000 vacuum tubes which were used for processing and ENIAC weighed nearly 30 Tons.

Thus the first generation of computers can be mapped between years 1937 to 1946. It used vacuum tubes and consumed high amount of electricity.

Second Generation: During 1947, two scientist from The Census Department of United States, namely Mauchly and Echert started developing Universal Automatic Computer or better known as UNIVAC, and in the year 1951 UNIVAC - 1 was finally launched for commercial use. The second generation computer or more precisely UNIVAC used transistors in place of vacuum tubes which were light weight and more reliable.

In 1953, International Business Machine or whom we better know as IBM, came out with their computers IBM 600 series and IBM 700 series. Since then IBM kept on developing computers and went on coming out with new upgraded versions and models like IBM 7094 series, IBM 1400 series (in which IBM 1401 was very popular), and the CDC 164 series.

The second generation also saw development of many programming languages, operating systems, memory, tape drives, disk drives and printers. Thus the second generation lasted from 1947 to 1960 and major development in the fields of computers was observed during this period.

Third Generation: In 1961, Jack Kilby developed Integrated Circuits (IC) which was then used in computers during the third generation. IC helped make less costly, smaller, more reliable and faster computers which consumed much less power.

IBM used this technology and developed computers like IBM 370, UNIVAC 1108 and many more. Thus the third generation saw more powerful yet smaller and less costlier computer devices and lasted from 1961 to 1970.

Fourth Generation: This generation started in 1971 and is still considered in use, as microprocessors where developed in this generation which we are still using. During the year 1971 Ted Hoff developed micro processors for INTEL and designed Large Scale Integration (LSI) and Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). Thus with the use of this technology, invention of computers saw more powerful, more reliable, very small in size and energy efficient devices.

In 1980, MS-DOS or Disk Operating System was developed and made by Microsoft and in 1981 IBM gave us our personal computer which in short we call PC.

In 1984, Apple came up with Macintosh with it's GUI or Graphical User Interface which had icons and then finally, in the 90's first WINDOWS Operating system was developed and introduced by Microsoft.

We would be soon encountering another generation of computers where parallel processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques will be highly used. It is similar to how a human brain functions and thus we will get super computers with unbelievable speed, reliability and longevity.

We will also get human like machines whom we call ROBOTS. They will be a part of our daily living and we will learn to live with them, take help from robots and even raise a family with them.

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