Who is created computer

His first attempt was the Difference Engine , which he began to build in , based on the principle of finite differences, in order to perform complex mathematical calculations by means of a simple series of additions and subtractions , avoiding multiplications and divisions.

He even created a small calculator that proved that his method worked, but he was not able to build a differential engine to fill in those coveted logarithmic and trigonometric tables with accurate data. Far from being discouraged by this setback, mathematician, philosopher, engineer and inventor Charles Babbage doubled down. He concentrated all his energies on developing the Analytical Engine , which was much more ambitious since it would be capable of performing even more complex calculations by computing multiplications and divisions.

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. The first computer that was Turing-complete, and that had those four basic features of our current computers was the ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer , secretly developed by the US army and first put to work at the University of Pennsylvania on 10 December in order to study the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.

Presper Eckert, occupied m2, weighed 30 tons, consumed kilowatts of electricity and contained some 20, vacuum tubes. Early computers were actually people, not machines — it was a job title. The word dates back to It is an ancient-Geek, hand-powered mechanical device. Archeologists believe it was used to calculate eclipses and other astronomical events. Due to its complexity, many speculate that it had several, less complex predecessors. Generally, these fulfilled a single purpose.

From until his death in , he designed 3 computers , but never actually constructed any of them, due to lack of funding. In Babbage started working on a Difference Engine its purpose was to compute polynomial functions. If completed it would have had some 25, parts, weighed 13, kg 15 short tons and been 2. Between — Babbage created drawings for the Difference Engine No. Amazingly, it worked! It took 6 years to build, weighs The Analytical Engine , a later Babbage computer design, would have had a whopping bytes of memory!

Punch cards were used as input, based on the Jacquard Loom punch card system , invented at the turn of the 19th century. He saw mechanical computers as a way to remove error. As we all know, necessity is the mother of invention and never was that more true that during WW2! During this period, electromechanical computer technology speed rocketed.

Early electromechanical computers were a sort of hybrid between modern electrical computers and analog computers. Electric switches drove mechanical relays, although parts still wore out quickly, electrical switches could open and close around 1, times faster than mechanical ones, making electromechanical computers much, much faster.

At the time the Japanese also had an automated, torpedo firing computer on their submarines. However, it was not capable of tracking a target.

In , Germany, Zuse began work on the Z1 : a mechanical calculator. It worked on a binary system and was fed paper tape. It was also pretty slow. However, with a little help from his friend Helmut Freier, an electrical engineer, this formed the basis of the Z2…. The Z2 was an electromechanical computer that was capable of slightly more varied functions. It took 0. 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. Considered as the first microcomputer, it used the Intel processor and was the first commercial non-assembly computer.

In , Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights.

The IBM is the first portable computer, which was released in September The computer weighed pounds and had a five-inch CRT display, tape drive , 1. The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I , which was released in April and developed by Adam Osborne. The Osborne I weighed The computer kit was developed by Steve Wozniak in and contained a 8-bit processor and 4 kb of memory, which was expandable to 8 or 48 kb using expansion cards.

Although the Apple I had a fully assembled circuit board, the kit required a power supply , display , keyboard , and case to be operational. Below is a picture of an Apple I from an advertisement by Apple. The computer was code-named Acorn. When was the first computer invented? Note Early inventions that lead up to the computer, such as the abacus , astrolabe, slide rule , clocks, calculator , and tablet machines, are not accounted for on this page. When was the word "computer" first used? First mechanical computer or automatic computing engine concept.

First general-purpose computer. The first machine to record and store information. First programmable computer. First concepts of what we consider a modern computer. The first electric programmable computer. The first digital computer. The first stored program computer. The first computer company. First computer with a program stored in memory. First commercial computer. IBM's first computer. The first computer with RAM. The first transistor computer.

The first minicomputer. The first desktop and mass-market computer. The first workstation. The first microprocessor.