History of Computers

You couldn’t always just come home and go on a computer. You couldn’t always do that because there were no computers and once the computers first came out they were for commercial use only. When the computers finally came to house-hold use they were simple and basic. There were no computers games or entertainment. The computer has developed a lot since they were first made.

There were not always major computer companies they had to be founded, such as Apple; it was founded by Steve Jobs, Ron Wayne, and Steve Wozniak in April 1976 in Los Altos, California. Apple soon became on of the most successful of the early personal computer manufacturers. Also another major computer company is Dell. It was founded in 1984 by Michael Dell. Dell sold computer systems directly to their costumers. On February 14, 1924, Thomas Watson founded the IBM Corporation which became a major computer company. In 1939, another soon to be major computer company, Hewlett-Packard, was founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Those are the founding of some major computer companies and there are many more.

A mainframe is nothing more than a very large computer, but it is very much different then the computers we have today. A mainframe is called what it is because it is a main computer and it is built into a frame and when you put the word main and frame together you get mainframe. That’s how it got its name. Since mainframes were so expensive, they were mostly manufactured by large companies such as IBM, Amdahl, Hitachi and more. They were mostly used for large-scale computing purposes, for example they were used in banks, insurance companies, etc.

Read more in History« Noah’s Ark and the Black SeaRurik the Viking »

The more famous mainframes were the ENIAC, MARK I, and the ILLIAC. The ENIAC was made in 1942 and ENIAC stands for electronic numerical integrator and calculator. It was pretty much the first mainframe computer because it was the first to complete more complicated task then the other mainframes that came out before it. In 1943, Howard Aiken, created the first programmable calculator. It is sometimes call the Harvard. The MARK I took up the space of a whole building. The ILLIAC was the first mainframe to be used at a University. The University was “The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign”. It was put on service on September 22, 1952.

Before flash drives people had to put their files on a different form of storage. The first was the 8 inch floppy drive. After magnetic media paper was not being used. It became very popular as it was sturdy, handy, and could store more files etc. than a paper roll could. Then after that the 5.25 inch floppy drive came out and it was double sided, had a bigger storage capacity and was much smaller. After that then cam the 3.5 inch floppy it was smaller and could hold more. It also had a cover so it could be carried along just about anywhere and it would not be damaged by dust etc. Then came the peak of secondary storage, the flash drive. It started with a just a couple megabytes of storage and could be used in any computer with a USB port and it was universal and could be used in any computer without any installation. Now we have flash drives with 1 GB to 8 GB or more of storage space. Now most new computers don’t even have a floppy disk drive built in. In the future their will be something that is better than a flash drive and the flash drives will become obsolete.

A 8 inch floppy disk along side of a 3.5 in. floppy.

A 5.25 inch floppy.

A cool Lego flash drive.

Computers have come a long way from mainframes and an abacus. Now you can just use a flash drive to save your files, but before you had to carry around a big old 8 inch floppy disk. Without the founders of the major computer companies, computers

would not be how they are today. Therefore computers have come very far to get to where they are now.

A timeline of important dates relating to computers:

• 1936 - Konrad Zuse - Z1 Computer
• 1942 - John Atanasoff & Clifford Berry - ABC Computer
• 1944 - Howard Aiken & Grace Hopper - Harvard Mark I Computer
• 1946 - John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly - ENIAC 1 Computer
• 1948 - Frederic Williams & Tom Kilburn - Manchester Baby Computer & The Williams Tube
• 1947/48 - John Bardeen, Walter Brattain & Wiliam Shockley - The Transistor
• 1951 - John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly - UNIVAC Computer
• 1953 - International Business Machines - IBM 701 EDPM Computers
• 1954 - John Backus & IBM - FORTRAN Computer Programming Language
• 1955 - Stanford Research Institute, Bank of America, and General Electric ERMA and MICR
• 1958 - Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce - The Integrated Circuit
• 1962 - Steve Russell & MIT - Spacewar Computer Game
• 1964 - Douglas Engelbart - Computer Mouse & Windows
• 1969 - ARPAnet
• 1970 - Intel 1103 Computer Memory
• 1971 - Alan Shugart &IBM - The “Floppy” Disk
• 1973 - Robert Metcalfe & Xerox - The Ethernet Computer Networking
• 1974/75 - Scelbi & Mark-8 Altair & IBM 5100 Computers
• 1976/77 - Apple I, II & TRS-80 & Commodore Pet Computers