Abacus - one of the earliest computers. Slide rules - a mechanical device, composed of a ruler with sliding insert, marked with various number scales, which facilitates such calculations as division, multiplication, finding roots and finding logarithms (McGraw-Hill. 1989. Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. Third Edition).

Early Time

1621 William Oughtred - an English mathematician who invented the first circular slide rule. This is considered the first analog computing device.

1642 Blaise Pascal - built the first automatic calculator. His machine, the Pascaline, was based on interlocking cogs and gears. He built 50 for sale, but clerks and accountants refused to use them for fear it would do away with their jobs!

1673 Gottfried Leibniz - designed a new type of mechanical calculator based on a cylinder with stepped teeth now called a Leibniz wheel. It could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

1804 Joseph Jacguard - a Frenchman who devised a stiff card punched with holes punched for weavers. The cards were used to let some strands of thread pass while blocking others. The Jacguard loom is not directly related to computers, but the idea of a punched card was later adapted by Babbage as the first mechanical method for entering information into a computer.

1822 Charles Babbage - completed the first difference engine, a very large machine funded by the British government that could solve polynomial equations. It was so sensitive that it broke more often than not, and a British Prime Minister declared its only purpose could be to compute the large amount spent to build it!

Babbage later devised the analytical engine which was designed to perform many more calculations. Although it was never built, it included 5 features crucial to future computers:

*an input device

*a storage facility to hold numbers for processing

*a processor or number calculator

*a control unit to direct tasks to be performed

*an output device.

1833 Augusta Ada - an amateur mathematician and close friend of Babbage who had the idea that the analytical engine could be programmed using a single set of cards for repeating instructions. This is the first time the concept of computer programming was suggested. She is considered the first computer programmer.

1886 Herman Hollerith - devised a tabulating machine that used punched cards to count electronically. The punched cards were sandwiched between brass rods; where there were holes in the card, the rods made contact and completed an electrical circuit. This device was constructed to allow the 1890 census to be tabulated. Hand tabulation was projected to take more than a decade.

1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company. In 1924, after several mergers and take-overs the company became International Business Machines (IBM).

1906 The first vacuum was produced.

1936 Alan Turning - Wrote his seminal paper describing a hypothetical digital computer, now referred to as a turning machine

Early Computers

The development of computer systems was strongly influenced by World War II. They were desperately needed to calculate missile trajectories, decipher codes, etc.

1939 ABC - the first digital computer. It was designed by Dr. John Astanasoff.

1944 Mark I - the first american general purpose computer controlled by programs. It was used at Harvard for 15 years.

1945 First "bug" - During development of the Mark II, a relay inside a computer failed and researchers found a moth beaten to death inside its contacts. This is thought to be the origin of the terms bug and debugging.

1946 ENIAC - a room sized computer with 18,000 vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes produce a lot of heat. This system could now heat New York City.

1945 John Von Neuman - developed the stored program concept. His idea was to store not only the data to be processed in computer memory, but also the instructions used to process the data. This idea is considered to be among the most important in all of science.

Evolution of the Computer Industry

First Generation Machines

The computer industry as we know it began with the development of the ENIAC (Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer). It was designed by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr. at the University of Pennsylvania from 1942 to 1945. The machine weighed 30 tons, contained 18,000 vacuum tubes and was 100 ft x 10 ft x 3 ft in size. On average, a tube failed every 15 minutes. Programming required 6000 switches to be set and it took 200 microseconds to add and 3 milliseconds to multiply by 3. The ENIAC was retired from service in 1955.

The Computer Age officially began on June 14, 1951 when the first UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the United States Census Bureau. This device, developed by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., was the first commercially available computer. The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp was organized in 1947 and sold to Remington-Rand shortly thereafter. On November 4, 1952, UNIVAC predicted that Dwight D. Eisenhower would defeat Adlai E. Stevenson in the presidential election after analyzing only five percent of the tallied vote.

The first major computer system in North Carolina was the UNIVAC 1105, manufactured by Remington-Rand, located at the University of North Carolina Computation Center in 1959. It cost $2,450,000 ($43,000 per month) in rental. Containing 7200 vacuum tubes, it required 3100 square feet of floor space and 35 tons of cooling. The memory capacity was approximately 54000 bytes along with approximately 144,000 bytes of mass storage. Simple addition operations could be performed in 44 microseconds.

IBM, on the other hand, had been building and marketing electromechanical punch card machines for processing large volumes of data for 40 years before ENIAC was built. The company was hesitant to move into the computer business up until the introduction of UNIVAC and business decreased due the replacement of punch card machines by the computer. The first computer produced by IBM was the IBM 701, which was delivered to the government in 1953 and followed shortly thereafter by the IBM 650. The company took the lead spot in computer sales in 1956 from Remington-Rand when it sold just 76 computers.

Second Generation Computers (1958-1964)

These computers began the period of technology transfer. Popular machines included the IBM 7090, 7070 and 1410. Other manufacturers included Sperry-Rand, RCA, General Electric, Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR, and Control Data. Common characteristics of these machines included the use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes, dramatically reducing size, implementation of assembly and high-level languages and the removable disk pack, introduced in 1962.

Third Generation Computers (1964-1970)

These machines were dominated by the IBM 360. They were constructed with integrated circuits (ICs). Use of these silicon semiconductors improved reliability, size, cost and power requirements. Machines of this type commonly employed batch processing techniques.

Forth Generation Computers (1970--- The forth generation of computers marks the beginning of microprocessor based machines. In 1969, Ted Hoff began work on the idea of placing all of the processing circuits of a single computer on a single chip. His subsequent development of this idea became the microprocessor of today. Believe it or not, Intel, Hoff's employer had a difficult time selling the concept. Potential buyers could not conceive of any possible applications for the devices. Today, they are found in everything from lawn sprinkler controls to cars to spacecraft. Their many applications have dramatically changed our lives.

Early microcomputer efforts included Altair (the very first microcomputer), EMCII, Tandy TRS- 80, Atari, and Commodore. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, however, changed the industry forever in 1976 when they sold a Volkswagon and a calculator to raise $1300 and build the first apple computer. The work was done in a garage. The system was the first major microcomputer with a keyboard and screen. By 1983, the company they founded, Apple made the fortune 500 list. The IBM PC was announced in 1981. It captured the top market share over the next 18 months and became an industry standard. Today, microcomputers like the IBM PC and the Apple MacIntosh are evolving along with workstations into yet another generation of computer system in which connectivity allows massive amounts of equipment and information resources to be shared. This next generation will bring about exciting changes in the way we work with each other and again change our lives.