Computers who invented

It had a monitor, keyboard and a 21 inch, flatscreen! The user could write and feed programs using a strip of film. The Colossus computer was a fully programmable, electronic, digital computer , developed to aid British codebreakers in decrypting German radio telegraphic traffic.

Unlike modern computers, it was programmed with a series of switches and plugs. Given our reliance on computers today, it is hard for us to imagine, but Turing had an extremely hard time convincing his contemporaries of the importance of his work. Like so many early computer scientists he struggled to get the funding he needed.

Note: The Colossus computer is not to be confused with the Bombe: an electromechanical device, also designed by Turing and used to decode Enigma, in His work did not stop at the end of WW2! After the war, he worked at Manchester University where he played a key role in developing early computing technology and wrote several papers, that still define the way with think about computer science to this day.

Although he might not be the man who invented computers, Turin is certainly the man who invented computer science! It lacked many of the functionalities of modern computers; it was designed for one specialist task and was not Turing complete. It was fully reprogrammable and so, able to solve a complex number of problems. It could take several days to program because it was programmed via external switches and dials. The ENIAC took 20 seconds to complete its first calculation, a mechanical computer of the time would have taken 40 hours.

By the time it was decommissioned, in , it had been used to solve problems as diverse as wind tunnels, random number generators, and weather prediction. The ENIAC contained 20, vacuum tubes, 7, crystal diodes, 1, relays, 70, resistors, 10, capacitors and 5,, hand-soldered joints.

It was 2. The ENIAC consumed a staggering kW of electricity, which led to a rumor that whenever it was switched on, lights dimmed in Philadelphia. Several tubes needed replacing every day. Although relatively simplistic to other computers of the time, it was the first computer to store its program digitally not via wires and switches. Like the Machester Baby, it also used a stored program.

However, it did not run exclusively on transistors and contained several tubes in its clock. It was not, a commercial success. In , Charles Babbage conceptualized and began developing the Difference Engine , which is considered the first automatic computing machine that could approximate polynomials.

The Difference Engine was capable of computing several sets of numbers and making hard copies of the results. Babbage received some help with the development of the Difference Engine from Ada Lovelace , considered to be the first computer programmer for her work. Unfortunately, because of funding, Babbage was never able to complete a full-scale functional version of this machine. In June , the London Science Museum completed the Difference Engine No 2 for the bicentennial year of Babbage's birth and later completed the printing mechanism in In , Charles Babbage proposed the first general mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine.

It is the first general-purpose computer concept that could be used for many things and not only one particular computation. Unfortunately, because of funding issues, this computer was also never built while Charles Babbage was alive. In , Henry Babbage, Charles Babbage's youngest son, was able to complete a portion of this machine and perform basic calculations. In , Herman Hollerith developed a method for machines to record and store information on punch cards for the US census.

Hollerith's machine was approximately ten times faster than manual tabulations and saved the census office millions of dollars. Hollerith would later form the company we know today as IBM. The Z1 was created by German Konrad Zuse in his parents' living room between and It is considered to be the first electromechanical binary programmable computer and the first functional modern computer.

The Turing machine was first proposed by Alan Turing in and became the foundation for theories about computing and computers. The machine was a device that printed symbols on paper tape in a manner that emulated a person following a series of logical instructions. Without these fundamentals, we wouldn't have the computers we use today. The Colossus was the first electric programmable computer, developed by Tommy Flowers , and was first demonstrated in December The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages.

The ABC was an electrical computer that used more than vacuum tubes for digital computation, including binary math and Boolean logic, and had no CPU was not programmable. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly was invalid. In the decision, Larson named Atanasoff the sole inventor. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in and was not completed until It occupied about 1, square feet and used about 18, vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons.

Once again, Babbage never got past the design stage, but it was those designs he began in that made him, perhaps not the father of computing, but definitely a prophet of what was to come. In , one year after Charles Babbage died, the great physicist William Thomson Lord Kelvin invented a machine capable of performing complex calculations and predicting the tides in a given place. It is considered the first analogue computer, sharing honours with the differential analyser built in by his brother James Thomson.

The latter device was a more advanced and complete version, which managed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel and disc mechanisms. However, it took several more decades until, well into the 20th century, H.

Between and , they built a differential analyser that was truly practical since it could be used to solve different problems, and as such, following that criterion, it could be considered the first computer. By this point, these analogue machines could already replace human computers in some tasks and were calculating faster and faster, especially when their gears began to be replaced by electronic components.

But they still had one serious drawback. They were designed to perform one type of calculation and if they were to be used for another, their gears or circuits had to be replaced. That was the case until , when a young English student, Alan Turing, thought of a computer that would solve any problem that could be translated into mathematical terms and then reduced to a chain of logical operations with binary numbers, in which only two decisions could be made: true or false.

The idea was to reduce everything numbers, letters, pictures, sounds to strings of ones and zeros and use a recipe a program to solve the problems in very simple steps. The digital computer was born, but for now it was only an imaginary machine.

At the end of the Second World War —during which he helped to decipher the Enigma code of the Nazi coded messages— Turing created one of the first computers similar to modern ones , the Automatic Computing Engine, which in addition to being digital was programmable; in other words, it could be used for many things by simply changing the program.

Although Turing established what a computer should look like in theory, he was not the first to put it into practice. That honour goes to an engineer who was slow to gain recognition, in part because his work was financed by the Nazi regime in the midst of a global war. On 12 May , Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in Berlin, which was the first fully functional programmable and automatic digital computer.

Just as the Silicon Valley pioneers would later do, Zuse successfully built the Z3 in his home workshop, managing to do so without electronic components, but using telephone relays. On the other side of the war, the Allied powers did attach importance to building electronic computers, using thousands of vacuum tubes. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems.

The A also marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product. A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes into the display and keyboard unit DSKY.

The AGC was one of the earliest uses of integrated circuits, and used core memory, as well as read-only magnetic rope memory. The astronauts were responsible for entering more than 10, commands into the AGC for each trip between Earth and the Moon.

The Nova line of computers continued through the s, and influenced later systems like the Xerox Alto and Apple 1. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its byte memory. In , after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors. Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket.

They did. The HP helped HP become one of the most dominant companies in the handheld calculator market for more than two decades. The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel , appears in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the had transistors and could perform up to 90, operations per second in four-bit chunks.

Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture. Under the direction of engineer Dr. Based on the Intel microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection.

In , Truong sold R2E to Bull. Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A cassette tape interface provided supplementary storage for text. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the s.

Wang was a successful calculator manufacturer, then a successful word processor company. The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces.

Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market. The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry. It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network. It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer.

For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders. Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines.

Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular. Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers. The banking industry rushed to adopt the machine, built to run during repair or expansion. The Video Display Module VDM marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers.

Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March , the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games. The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them. High packaging density of integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed. Typical applications included US national defense work, including the design and simulation of nuclear weapons, and weather forecasting.

Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the , the Intel could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes. The Zilog Z could run any program written for the and included twice as many built-in machine instructions.

Designed by Sunnyvale, California native Steve Wozniak, and marketed by his friend Steve Jobs, the Apple-1 is a single-board computer for hobbyists. With an order for 50 assembled systems from Mountain View, California computer store The Byte Shop in hand, the pair started a new company, naming it Apple Computer, Inc.

In all, about of the boards were sold before Apple announced the follow-on Apple II a year later as a ready-to-use computer for consumers, a model which sold in the millions for nearly two decades. When connected to a color television set, the Apple II produced brilliant color graphics for the time. Millions of Apple IIs were sold between and , making it one of the longest-lived lines of personal computers.

Apple gave away thousands of Apple IIs to school, giving a new generation their first access to personal computers. The TRS proved popular with schools, as well as for home use. The TRS line of computers later included color, portable, and handheld versions before being discontinued in the early s.

The first of several personal computers released in , the PET comes fully assembled with either 4 or 8 KB of memory, a built-in cassette tape drive, and a membrane keyboard.

The PET was popular with schools and for use as a home computer. After the success of the PET, Commodore remained a major player in the personal computer market into the s. The success of the VAX family of computers transformed DEC into the second-largest computer company in the world, as VAX systems became the de facto standard computing system for industry, the sciences, engineering, and research.

Shortly after delivery of the Atari VCS game console, Atari designs two microcomputers with game capabilities: the Model and Model The served primarily as a game console, while the was more of a home computer. Atari's 8-bit computers were influential in the arts, especially in the emerging DemoScene culture of the s and '90s. The Motorola microprocessor exhibited a processing speed far greater than its contemporaries.

This high performance processor found its place in powerful work stations intended for graphics-intensive programs common in engineering. Intended to be a less expensive alternative to the PET, the VIC was highly successful, becoming the first computer to sell more than a million units.

Commodore even used Star Trek television star William Shatner in advertisements. About 50, were sold in Britain, primarily to hobbyists, and initially there was a long waiting list for the system. The machine was expandable, with ports for cassette storage, serial interface and rudimentary networking. The DN is based on the Motorola microprocessor, high-resolution display and built-in networking - the three basic features of all workstations.

Apollo and its main competitor, Sun Microsystems, optimized their machines to run the computer-intensive graphics programs common in engineering and scientific applications. Apollo was a leading innovator in the workstation field for more than a decade, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in IBM's brand recognition, along with a massive marketing campaign, ignites the fast growth of the personal computer market with the announcement of its own personal computer PC.

It featured a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, a modem, and two 5. Thousands of software titles were released over the lifespan of the C64 and by the time it was discontinued in , it had sold more than 22 million units.

It is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest selling single computer of all time. Franklin was able to undercut Apple's pricing even while offering some features not available on the original.