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. ENIAC was soon surpassed by other computers that stored their programs in electronic memories.
The vacuum tubes were replaced first by transistors and eventually by microchips, with which the computer miniaturization race commenced.
But that giant machine, built by the great winner of the Second World War, launched our digital age. Nowadays, it would be unanimously considered the first true computer in history if it were not for Konrad Zuse , who decided in to reconstruct his Z3, which had been destroyed by a bombing in The replica was exhibited at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where it is found today.
There is no easy answer to this question due to the many different classifications of computers. The first mechanical computer, created by Charles Babbage in , doesn't resemble what most would consider a computer today.
Therefore, this page provides a listing of each of the computer firsts, starting with the Difference Engine and leading up to the computers we use today.
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. The word "computer" was first used in in the book The Yong Mans Gleanings by Richard Braithwaite and originally described a human who performed calculations or computations.
The definition of a computer remained the same until the end of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution gave rise to mechanical machines whose primary purpose was calculating.
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.
Although a judge later ruled the ABC computer was the first digital computer, many still consider the ENIAC to be the first digital computer because it was fully functional. Kilburn wrote the first electronically-stored program, which finds the highest proper factor of an integer , using repeated subtraction rather than division. It also features a drop-down menu and icons. It flops but eventually evolves into the Macintosh.
The Gavilan SC is the first portable computer with the familiar flip form factor and the first to be marketed as a "laptop. This was the company's response to Apple's GUI. Commodore unveils the Amiga , which features advanced audio and video capabilities. More than two years later, only dot-coms had been registered. Its bit architecture provides as speed comparable to mainframes. Facebook, a social networking site, launches. Google acquires Android, a Linux-based mobile phone operating system.
Nintendo's Wii game console hits the market. They're usually each tailored to attack a particular algorithm," said study lead author Shantanu Debnath, a quantum physicist and optical engineer at the University of Maryland, College Park. This richness provides a vast design space for exploring novel and multi-value ways to encode and process data beyond the 0s and 1s of current logic-based, digital architectures.
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