The Turning Machine
The ENIAC
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In 1822, English mathematician Charles Babbage creates the idea of a calculating machine that would be able to compute tables of numbers, however, his project, with the funding of the English government, failed. Even though Babbage's project failed, more than a century later, the first computer was created.
In 1936, Alan Turning created the Turning Machine, a machine capable of computing anything that is computable. The basis of this machine is the central concept of the modern computer. In 1937, J.V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics, attempts to create the first computer without gear, belts, cams, or shafts. In 1941, Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, designed a computer that can solve 29 equations simultaneously, making it the first computer that can store information on it's main memory. In 1943, two university professors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, built the ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integer And Calculator, which is considered to be the grandfather of all digital computers. |
In 1946 ,Mauchly and Prespor receive funding from the Cenus Bureau to build the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer for business and government application.
In 1953, Grace Hopper develops COBOL, the first computer language. IN 1954, the FORTRAN programming language is made. In 1964, Douglas Engelbart shows a prototype of the modern computer, with a mouse and GUI. This is a major event because it marks the change when the computer was a special machine for scientists to accessible technology to the public. A group of developers at Bell Labs create UNIX in 1969. UNIX is an operating system that addressed comparability issues. The UNIX was portable across multiple platforms and became the operating system of choice among mainframes at large companies and government entities, but due to it's slow system, it never gained traction among home PC users . In 1971, Alan Shugart leaded a team of engineers at IBM that invented the floppy disks, which allows data to be shared among computers. In 1973, Robert Metcalf develops Ethernet to connect multiple computers and other hardware. |
The UNIVAC I
Douglas Engelbart's computer mouse
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