The History of Computers :: Computers Technology Essays

The History of Computers Computers have been around for quite some time and were developed over many years with contributions from philosophers, inventors, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, technicians, visionaries, and scholars. The first computers were calculating machines and over time evolved into the digital computers as we know them today. It has taken over 180 years for the computer to develop from an idea in Charles Babbage head into an actual computer developed today by many different companies. Therefore, it was a long and tedious path in order to make the computer into what we now use today. Before computers, people had to do calculations using such tools as a Chinese abacus or a slide rule to work out problems by hand. One day in 1821, Charles Babbage decided that he didn feel like working out tedious mathematics problems anymore and wanted to compute numbers using what he called a machine with steam(Palfreman and Swade 16). For the next ten or so years Babbage worked on designing the Difference Engine, however it was never built as it would have weighed several tons and taken entirely too many parts to put together. A few years later, Babbage came up with the Analytical Engine, which he designed to do arithmetic operations. This machine was programmable and the information was stored on punch cards (Palfreman and Swade 20). Charles Babbage never did get to build one of his machines, however, his son Henry Babbage built a machine, which was based on his father ideas. The next step in the development of computers was commercial machines. In the early 1820, Thomas de Colmar came up with the first successful commercial calculator, called the arithmometer, and it was able to perform the four basic arithmetic functions (Palfreman and Swade 22). The next progression of computers came in 1896, when the U.S. Census Bureau could not keep up with the reading and organizing of their surveys. Herman Hollerith invented the electric tabulating system, which could read the data in coded punched cards (Palfreman and Swade 24). During, the 1930, there were two main sub-divisions in the computer world, the calculator industry and the office machine industry.