When was computer hardware invented

This is likely the first example of remote access computing. The Z3, an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere, uses 2, relays, performs floating point binary arithmetic, and has a bit word length.

The Z3 was used for aerodynamic calculations but was destroyed in a bombing raid on Berlin in late Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the s, which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Hundreds of allied bombes were built in order to determine the daily rotor start positions of Enigma cipher machines, which in turn allowed the Allies to decrypt German messages. The basic idea for bombes came from Polish code-breaker Marian Rejewski's "Bomba. After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in , Professor John Vincent Atanasoff receives funds to build a full-scale machine at Iowa State College now University.

The machine was designed and built by Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry between and The legal result was a landmark: Atanasoff was declared the originator of several basic computer ideas, but the computer as a concept was declared un-patentable and thus freely open to all. The replica is currently on display at the Computer History Museum.

The US Army asked Bell Laboratories to design a machine to assist in testing its M-9 gun director, a type of analog computer that aims large guns to their targets. Mathematician George Stibitz recommends using a relay-based calculator for the project.

The Relay Interpolator used relays, and since it was programmable by paper tape, was used for other applications following the war. A total of ten Colossi were delivered, each using as many as 2, vacuum tubes. A series of pulleys transported continuous rolls of punched paper tape containing possible solutions to a particular code. Colossus reduced the time to break Lorenz messages from weeks to hours. Most historians believe that the use of Colossus machines significantly shortened the war by providing evidence of enemy intentions and beliefs.

The Mark 1 produced mathematical tables but was soon superseded by electronic stored-program computers. In a widely circulated paper, mathematician John von Neumann outlines the architecture of a stored-program computer, including electronic storage of programming information and data -- which eliminates the need for more clumsy methods of programming such as plugboards, punched cards and paper.

Hungarian-born von Neumann demonstrated prodigious expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the use of mechanical devices for computation. Under the leadership of MIT's Gordon Brown and Jay Forrester, the team first built a small analog simulator, but found it inaccurate and inflexible.

News of the groundbreaking electronic ENIAC computer that same year inspired the group to change course and attempt a digital solution, whereby flight variables could be rapidly programmed in software.

Completed in , Whirlwind remains one of the most important computer projects in the history of computing. Because of its electronic, as opposed to electromechanical, technology, it is over 1, times faster than any previous computer. ENIAC used panel-to-panel wiring and switches for programming, occupied more than 1, square feet, used about 18, vacuum tubes and weighed 30 tons.

It was believed that ENIAC had done more calculation over the ten years it was in operation than all of humanity had until that time. Their first program, consisting of seventeen instructions and written by Kilburn, ran on June 21st, This was the first program in history to run on a digital, electronic, stored-program computer.

These tables were later confirmed by using more modern computers for the actual flights. The SSEC was one of the last of the generation of 'super calculators' to be built using electromechanical technology. It was transferred to the Department of Physics at the University of Melbourne in and remained in service until The first practical stored-program computer to provide a regular computing service, EDSAC is built at Cambridge University using vacuum tubes and mercury delay lines for memory.

Wilkes' ideas grew out of the Moore School lectures he had attended three years earlier. This type of computer is useful in performing many of the mathematical equations scientists and engineers encounter in their work. It was originally created for a nuclear missile design project in by a team led by Fred Steele. It used 53 vacuum tubes and hundreds of germanium diodes, with a magnetic drum for memory. Tracks on the drum did the mathematical integration.

The Manchester Mark I used more than 1, vacuum tubes and occupied an area the size of a medium room. The , designed by ERA but built by Remington-Rand, was intended for high-speed computing and stored 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, one of the earliest magnetic storage devices and a technology which ERA had done much to perfect in its own laboratories.

The design packed vacuum tubes into a relatively compact 12 square feet. The hobbyist magazine Radio Electronics publishes Edmund Berkeley's design for the Simon 1 relay computer from to Let us call it Simon, because of its predecessor, Simple Simon Simon is so simple and so small in fact that it could be built to fill up less space than a grocery-store box; about four cubic feet.

It was built in Washington DC as a test-bed for evaluating components and systems as well as for setting computer standards. It was also one of the first computers to use all-diode logic, a technology more reliable than vacuum tubes.

SWAC was used to solve problems in numerical analysis, including developing climate models and discovering five previously unknown Mersenne prime numbers. A British government contract spurred its initial development but a change in government led to loss of funding and the second and only other Mark I was sold at a major loss to the University of Toronto, where it was re-christened FERUT. The Univac 1 is the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention.

One biblical scholar even used a Univac 1 to compile a concordance to the King James version of the Bible. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons went into business manufacturing computers to meet the growing need for data processing systems in business. The Institute of Advanced Study IAS computer is a multi-year research project conducted under the overall supervision of world-famous mathematician John von Neumann. The IAS computer was designed for scientific calculations and it performed essential work for the US atomic weapons program.

The bit machine used 92 point-contact transistors and diodes. During three years of production, IBM sells 19 s to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government. Programmer Arthur Samuels used the to write the first computer program designed to play checkers.

It was named after John von Neumann, a world famous mathematician and computer pioneer of the day. Johnniac was used for scientific and engineering calculations. It was also repeatedly expanded and improved throughout its year lifespan. Many innovative programs were created for Johnniac, including the time-sharing system JOSS that allowed many users to simultaneously access the machine.

IBM establishes the as its first mass-produced computer, with the company selling in just one year. The Model was also highly popular in universities, where a generation of students first learned programming. Over 30 were completed, including one delivered to Australia. Typically, computer users of the time fed their programs into a computer using punched cards or paper tape.

Doug Ross wrote a memo advocating direct access in February. Ross contended that a Flexowriter -- an electrically-controlled typewriter -- connected to an MIT computer could function as a keyboard input device due to its low cost and flexibility. An experiment conducted five months later on the MIT Whirlwind computer confirmed how useful and convenient a keyboard input device could be. For easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube.

DEC is founded initially to make electronic modules for test, measurement, prototyping and control markets. Headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts, Digital Equipment Corporation, took over 8, square foot leased space in a nineteenth century mill that once produced blankets and uniforms for soldiers who fought in the Civil War. The mill is still in use today as an office park Clock Tower Place today.

The is built on a 'building block' concept which allows it to be highly flexible for many different uses and could simultaneously control up to 63 tape drives—very useful for large databases of information. For many business users, quick access to this huge storage capability outweighed its relatively slow processing speed. Customers included US military as well as industry. Its task was to detect incoming Soviet bombers and direct interceptor aircraft to destroy them.

Operators directed actions by touching a light gun to the SAGE airspace display. Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar! More than 50 PDP-1s were sold. It was sold exclusively in Japan, but could process alphabetic and Japanese kana characters.

Only about thirty NEACs were sold. It managed Japan's first on-line, real-time reservation system for Kinki Nippon Railways in Another important language was LOGO, developed in to help children get involved in programming.

Early forms of software were bundled with the computers that they were written for, meaning that in order to get the software the customer wanted, they also had to buy the hardware with it.

The Supreme Court decision in the Digidyne v. Data General case in effectively put an end to this, while the free software movement arose in the same decade, led by pioneers such as Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project. This resulted in an open-source subculture where programmers freely shared the source code for their software, ensuring its propagation and use across a broad number of different emerging and established computer systems.

At the same time, commercial software flourished in the form of operating systems, business and scientific software, and games. Some of the most notable software that came from the s and s includes the free and open-source Linux operating system and the commercial Microsoft Windows family of operating systems.

Web browser software emerged in the s, bringing the Internet to the masses, and video games had a renaissance on home computers. In the s, operating systems such as Apple iOS and Google Android flourished for mobile devices, and programs known as apps became commonplace. Computers and software are still evolving. Scientists are currently working on quantum computers that use quantum bits, or qubits, instead of binary digits.

These computers may be capable of running millions of times faster than computers of today. It used a standard five-pin bowling ball as its trackball, which is smaller than the more common pin bowling ball. Above: The first trackball, bowling ball and all. It held everything in the same unit, packing in a processor, ROM several hundreds of kilobytes and RAM 16 — 64 KB , a five-inch CRT display, keyboard, and a tape drive, which was an amazing feat at the time.

IBM was introduced to the public as the first portable computer in Check our Gallery of Early Computers s — s. The first laptop computer or notebook was the Grid Compass called the GRiD and was designed in by a British industrial designer, Bill Moggridge.

Above left: Closeup of the Grid Compass On the first IBM PC, the optional 10MB hard disk drive could only be installed if the original power supply was replaced the original one was too weak. Only about units were produced.

The Apple I was basically just a motherboard with a processor, a total of 8KB of RAM, a display interface, and some additional functionality.

To have a working computer, the buyer would have to add a power supply, a keyboard, and a display and a case to keep mount it all in.

In , Apple claimed to be the first trillion-dollar company. Check our article on how Apple reinvented the laptop. Above left: An Apple I computer. Above right: This was the Apple I, essentially a motherboard. Many hobbyists during the mids designed their own systems, with various degrees of success, and sometimes banded together to ease the job. Out of these house meetings the Homebrew Computer Club developed, where hobbyists met to talk about what they had done, exchange schematics and software, and demonstrate their systems.

Many people built or assembled their own computers as per published designs. For example, many thousands of people built the Galaksija home computer later in the early s. It was arguably the Altair computer that spawned the development of Apple, as well as Microsoft which produced and sold the Altair BASIC programming language interpreter, Microsoft's first product. The second generation of microcomputers, those that appeared in the late s, sparked by the unexpected demand for the kit computers at the electronic hobbyist clubs, were usually known as home computers.

For business use these systems were less capable and in some ways less versatile than the large business computers of the day. They were designed for fun and educational purposes, not so much for practical use. For the more technical hobbyists home computers were also used for electronics interfacing, such as controlling model railroads, and other general hobbyist pursuits.

The advent of the microprocessor and solid-state memory made home computing affordable. Early hobby microcomputer systems such as the Altair and Apple I introduced around marked the release of low-cost 8-bit processor chips, which had sufficient computing power to be of interest to hobby and experimental users. By pre-assembled systems such as the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS later dubbed the " Trinity" by Byte Magazine began the era of mass-market home computers; much less effort was required to obtain an operating computer, and applications such as games, word processing, and spreadsheets began to proliferate.

The PC was heavily cloned, leading to mass production and consequent cost reduction throughout the s. This expanded the PCs presence in homes, replacing the home computer category during the s and leading to the current monoculture of architecturally identical personal computers.

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