Evolution And Development Of The Computer example essay topic

There is no noun with the ability to represent modern life other than computer. Whether the effect is negative or positive, computers control nearly every aspect of our everyday life. Computers have evolved from bearing the role of strictly computing to having the ability of completing unthinkable tasks. Supermarket scanners calculate our grocery bill while keeping store inventory; computerized telephone switching centers play traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of communication untangled; and ATM's let us conduct banking transactions form virtually anywhere in the world. Around five thousand years ago in Asia, a simple machine called the Abacus, bearing a system of sliding beads arranged on a rack such as ones found in a pool hall may be considered the first computer.

Merchants used the Abacus to record their barter transactions. Its popularity began to fall when the use of paper and pencil spread particularly throughout Europe, its importance diminished. Computers were looked at as a way to simplify large workloads into discreet tasks. The United States census of 1880 took seven years to tally. The fear of later censuses taking an even more absurd amount of time to count, the bureau turned to technology. An American inventor also applied the concept to computing.

He fed cards storing data into a machine compiling the results instinctively. Punched holes in the cards would represent letters and number, a single hole depicted a number, while a combination of two holes portrayed a letter. This allowed the census results in six weeks. Not only did the machine remarkably decrease the amount of time the census took, but also the cards used represented stored memory of the census and reduced computational errors.

It found its way into the business world founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, which later became International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. After this point in history the evolution of the computer is began to become an increased desired area of interest. The first major interest began with the onset of World War II. A German engineer developed a computer to design airplanes and missiles. The British were also in the race of enhancing computer technology. They completed a secret code-breaking computer used to decode German messages.

The existence of the machine was not uncovered until decades after the war. The first all-electronic calculator was design by a Harvard engineer in 1944 who was working with IBM. The calculator was about the size of one half a football field and consisted of 500 miles of writing. It was called the Harvard-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. The machine took anywhere from 3 to 5 seconds for each calculation but possessed the ability to compute complex equations. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was produced in a partnership between the United States government the University of Pennsylvania.

The ENIAC contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 5 million soldered joints, the massive machine consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power. It was a general-purpose computer, which was able to compute at speed up to 1,000 times faster than previous computers. Since the ENIAC, computers have become more complex, and what once was the size of a football field is not the size of a fingernail. The evolution and development of the computer has taken thousands of giant leaps in advances since the start of the twentieth century and continues to grow.

It took thousands of years for ancient scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers to improve the smallest amount on the Abacus. Today, the world relies on computers to take care of everything and with out these great men who dedicated their lives to the advancement of computing, the world would not nearly be the way it is today.