History of Computers

The world of technology is an ever-changing realm which is extremely dominant in today's society.  Everything we do, from registering for next semester's classes to buying houses, revolves around technology, but especially computers.  Computers are now considered a requirement for education, and sometimes work.  But all this did not just start in an instant.  Computers were being built decades before I was even born, and ever since then, as time passed, improvements and alterations were made to them.  Now they are incredibly intelligent pieces of equipment after all those years of development, and all thanks to those who were determined and wanted to make a difference in the world of not only ours, but of technology as well.

Although the history of computers span over decades, it is hard to say when was the first one due to the many classifications and diversity of computers.  But to make life simple, I shall begin with the first mechanical computer ever created.  The Z1, created by fellow German, Konrad Zuse in the year of 1936.  It was a fairly simple computer, only capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with only a limited amount of control logic.  The average time it would take to add was five seconds and to multiply, ten seconds.  Several years after that, John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry invented the ABC Computer in 1942.  This computer invoked three important ideas that are still used even nowadays.  Based on information I  gathered from Wikipedia, it uses "binary digits to represent all numbers and data", "performs all calculations using electronics rather than wheels ratchets, or mechanical switches", and it "organizes a system in which computation and memory are separated".  At last, in 1951 the first commercial computer appeared on the horizon.  Created by John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, the UNIVAC I was capable of performing about 1,905 operations per second which was quite a feat at the time.  The UNIVACs were mainly used in military bases or universities and others, but not many due to its increasing price which rose from $159,000 to $1,500,000.

Finally the moment we've all been waiting for.  IBM enters the race with their first computer, IBM 701 EDPM made in 1952.  This new computer was not very far from IBM's next development: the FORTRAN Computer Programming Language.  This language turned out to be good to use in general, and is best utilized for numeric computation and scientific computing.  It is still used to this day in the area of high-performance computing and is still in use in computational areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, and computational chemistry.  It is still being improved in any way possible in order to make it more efficient and is used for programs that benchmark super-computers.

By 1955 even the banks had their own computers.  With they're special computers, called ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine-Accounting), they no longer had to manually book keep checks and handle accounts; now it was all automated thanks to GE, Bank of America, and SRI.  They also integrated a new technology in order to process the checks more efficiently, hence the introduction to the MICR (magnetic ink character recognition).

At last in 1974/75, the first consumer computers came out.  For now, there was only three available computers to the general public and that were more affordable, as well as manageable of course.  These included: the Scelbi, Mark-8 Altair, and IBM 5100.  These three computers were competing each other vigorously, each trying to prevail over the other.  Couple of years later, more computers entered the competition, all of them striving to be the best.

Alas, in 1981 Microsoft finally releases their first operating system called MS-DOS which was intended for the Intel 8086 since it had none available.  MS-DOS allowed one to attain greater speed by direct control of hardware which was useful in the case of playing computer games.

Then in 1984/85 began the war between Apple and Microsoft with the creation of Apple Macintosh Computer and Microsoft Windows.  The Apple was a more affordable home computer with a GUI; therefore, Microsoft had to bring their cards to the table as well in order to maintain the competition without losing profit of course.  This silent war continues to this very day with their latest releases of Mac OS X10.5 and Windows 7.

After having done all this research on the history of computers, it made me want to look more into them.  But that can wait, since one must know first what does the area of computer science entail of.  What I believe it is, without having looked for information on it beforehand, computer science revolves around not just the hardware of a computer, but also of the software along with the programming of one.  It deals with the what, why, and how computers work.