The history of computers starts out about 2000 years ago, at the birth of the abacus, a wooden rack holding two horizontal wires with beads strung on them. When these beads are moved around according to programming rules used by the user, all regular arithmetic problems can be done.

          Blaise Pascal is usually credited for building the first digital computer in 1642. It added numbers entered with dials and was made to help his father, a tax collector. In 1671 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invented a computer that was built in 1694. It could add, and, after changing some things around, multiply. Leibniz invented a special stepped gear mechanism for introducing the added digits, and this is still being used.

          The prototypes made by Pascal and Leibniz were not used in many places, and considered weird until a little more than a century later, when Thomas of Colmar created the first successful mechanical calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

                Charles Babbage realized in 1812 that many long calculations, especially those needed to make mathematical tables, were really a series of predictable actions that were constantly repeated. From this he suspected that it should be possible to do these automatically. He designed an automatic mechanical calculating machine, which he called a difference engine. By 1822, he had a working model to demonstrate with. With financial help from the British government, Babbage started fabrication of a difference engine in 1823. It was intended to be steam powered and fully automatic, including the printing of the resulting tables, and commanded by a fixed instruction program. In 1833 he lost interest in this machine because he thought he had a better idea—the construction of what would now be called a general purpose, fully program-controlled, automatic mechanical digital computer. Babbage called this idea an Analytical Engine.

          The analytical engine was soon to use punched cards, which would be read into the machine from several different Reading Stations. The machine was supposed to operate automatically, by steam power, and require only one person there. Punch cards were cards that could read the information that had been punched into cards automatically, without human help. Because of this, reading errors were reduced dramatically, work flow increased, and, most importantly, stacks of punched cards could be used as easily accessible memory of almost unlimited size. Furthermore, different problems could be stored on different stacks of cards and accessed when needed.

          In 1942, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly, and their associates at the Moore school of Electrical Engineering of University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high-speed electronic computer to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator). The size of ENIAC’s numerical “word” was 10 decimal digits, and it could multiple two of these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the cause of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was therefore generation of relay computers. It used 18000 vacuum tubes; about 1800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180000 watts of electrical power. it had one multiplier, I divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring counters, which served as adders and also as quick access read-write register storage.

**All information and pictures came from www.softlord.com/comp/

          Another good site is www.maxmon.com/history.htm

          I think that 10 years from now there will be a voice activated computer where all you do is speak into the computer and then it automatically searches for you and brings up what you are looking for.

          Maybe 100 years from now there will be an internet/watch, where you have the internet on your watch and you can take it anywhere with you. There could possibly be something even better, where you don’t even need a computer or the internet. People are coming up with different things each and everyday, so 100 years from now, anything is possible.                                                       

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