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... is the first invention from HP, Disney used the 200B model to create the sound effects
for several of their movies” (Timeline of Computer History). ...
History of the Computer. The History of the Computer Long before computers
were invented, humans realized the need for them. The ...
Computer History. History of Computers The earliest existence of a modern day
computer's ancestor was the abacus. These date back to almost 2000 years ago. ...
computer history. History of ... computer. For the sake of time we will begin
our computer history with the invention of the abacus. The ...
Computer Science (History). The early foundations of what would become computer
science predate the invention of the modern digital computer. ...
Submitted by kdbaker2 on April 25, 2006
Category: Technology
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The History of the Computer
Long before computers were invented, humans realized the need for them. The history of the Computer started about 2000 years ago with the abacus. It is a wooden rack holding two horizontal wires with beads strung on them and was one of the best calculating machines until the seventeenth century (PBS, 1). In 1835, English inventor, Charles Babbage came up with the idea of the Analytical Machine, a general purpose, fully programmed-controlled, automatic mechanical digital computer, which consisted of two parts, a calculating section and a storage section. His machine was capable of reading the punched holes in cards, just as the loom did (Campbell-Kelly, 15-17).
In 1890 Herman Hollerith and James Powers, who worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, developed devices that could read the information that had been punched into cards. The information was recorded by a machine equipped with many metal pins that poked through the punched holes but stopped where no holes existed. The 1890 census was completed in one-third the time taken in 1880, reading errors were reduced and work flow increased (Campbell-Kelly, 20-21). These advantages were seen by commercial companies and soon led to the development of improved punch-card using computers created by IBM and Remington. These computers used electromechanical devices in which electric power provided mechanical motion. They could be fed a specified number of cards automatically, add, multiply, and divide, and feed out cards with punched results. For more than 50 years after their first use, punched cards machines did most of the world's first business computing, and a considerable amount of the computing work in science (Ceruzzi, 16-17).
The start of World War II produced a large need for computer capacity, especially for the military. New weapons were made for which trajectory tables and other essential data were needed. Two men, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper...
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