A blast from the Past (about computers)

Computers are an integral part of today’s world and new technologies have transformed and will continue to transform the modern world.

Today, communication takes place through text messaging, cell phones, Internet video-conferencing, e-mail and social networking among others.

New technologies allow people to stay in touch with friends and family around the world, and in the same way allows companies to compete in a global marketplace.

The original meaning of the word “computer” referred to someone who performed calculations and not to a machine itself.

There are two distinct families of “computers: Digital computers and analog computers.

The first computers were analog, not digital, and both operate on quite different principles.

An analog computer works completely differently from a digital computer. In it, the representation of the data reflects the properties of the data being modeled. For example, data and numbers can be represented by physical quantities such as electrical voltage in an analog computer, while a stream of binary digits represents them in a digital computer.

Calculation in a digital computer is based on the use of the binary digits, “0” and “1”. Electronic circuits are used to represent binary numbers, by means of an electrical switch state of an electrical switch (“on” or “off”) thus representing a binary digit internally.

A digital computer is a sequential device that usually works with data step by step. Data is represented in binary format, and a single transistor is used to represent a binary digit in a digital computer, but several transistors are needed to store larger numbers.

store larger numbers. The first digital computers were developed in the 1940s.

Analog computers were studied by James Thompson (brother of physicist Lord Kelvin) who did the first work that took computers from an idea to a reality.

Thompson in the 19th century. He invented a wheel integrator

and the integrating disk, which was used in mechanical analog devices, and worked with his brother Kelvin on building a device to perform integration of a product of two functions. 

James Thompson (brother of physicist Lord Kelvin) did the early foundational work in analog computing in the 19th century. He invented a wheel and disk integrator, which was used in mechanical analog devices, Later, Kelvin built an analog tide prediction computer that remained in use at the Port of Liverpool until the 1960s.

Early digital computers used vacuum tubes to store binary information, and a tube could represent the binary value “0” or “1”. These tubes were large and bulky and generated a significant amount of heat. Air conditioning was needed to cool the machine, and there were problems with the reliability of the tubes.

Shockley and others invented the transistor in the late 1940s, and it replaced vacuum tubes beginning in the late 1950s. Transistors are small and consume very little power, so the resulting machines are smaller, faster and more reliable.

Integrated circuits were introduced in the early 1960s, and now an enormous amount of computing power could be put on a very small chip. Integrated circuits are small and consume very little power and can be mass-produced with very high quality. However, integrated circuits are difficult to modify or repair and almost always have to be replaced.

The fundamental architecture of a computer remains basically the same since von Neumann and others

since von Neumann and others proposed it in the mid-1940s. It includes a central processing unit that includes the control unit and arithmetic unit, an input and input/output unit, and a memory.

Digital computers were invented in 1941 by Konrad Zuse named “Z3”. During the same year, Atanasoff invented the first digital electronic computer named “Atansasoff-Berry Computer”, also known as “ABC”. Those were key inventions for the creation of the first computer with a stored program made by a Cambridge team in 1949.

In 1953, Grace Cooper developed the first programming language, COBOL, and in 1954, IBM  described and created its first programming language, FORTRAN.

During 1968, Douglas Engelbart showed his computer prototype that uses a mouse and a graphic interface.

This was the beginning of computers as we nowadays know.