Module2: Evolution of Technology

Lesson 2 The History of Computers

 At the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
1. Trace the history of computers
2. Finding how calculations were made during ancient times
3. Identify the people who made significant contributions in
the inventions of calculating machines and computers during
the years from 1600-1900 and up to present
 An integrated set of components for
collecting, storing, and processing data and
for providing information, knowledge, and
digital products.
 Are used to run inter-organizational supply
chains and electronic markets.
These include the following:
•eBay
•Amazon
•Alibaba
•Google
 The components of
information systems are
computer hardware, soft
ware and
telecommunications.
 This is the physical technology that works with
information. Hardware can be as small as a
smartphone that fits in a pocket or as large as a
supercomputer that fills a building. Hardware also
includes the peripheral devices that work with
computers.
 This computer hardware has different
components, such as:
•Mother Board
•RAM
•ROM
•Monitor
•CPU
• It is the main circuit board of
a microcomputer.

• It connects CPU, Memory,

Expansion Slots and
controllers required to
control standard hardware
devices.
• RAM is the place in a computer
where operating system,
application programs and data
in current use are kept.
• It is a temporary memory and
can be compared to a person’s
short term memory
• It is a Permanent Road
Storage

• It is a technology that allows

you to write data only once.
After the data has been
written, you can read it an
unlimited number of times
• It is a screen where you can
see the image representation
of actions performed in the
computer with the help of
mouse and keyboard.
• It is the brain of the
computer. Most of the
calculations taken place here.

It has 2 components, one

Arithmetic logic Unit (ALU)
and second is Control Unit
 Computer software falls into two broad classes: system
software and application software. The principal system software is
the operating system. It manages the hardware, data and program
files, and other system resources and provides means for the user to
control the computer, generally via a graphical user interface (GUI).
Application software is programs designed to handle specific tasks for
users. Smartphone apps became a common way for individuals to
access information systems.
 This component connects the
hardware together to form a network.
Connections can be through wires,
such as Ethernet cables or fibre optics,
or wireless, such as through Wi-Fi,
through a local area network (LAN). If
computers are more dispersed, the
network is called a wide area network
(WAN).
 Information technology has been
around for a long, long time.
Basically as long as people have
been around.
 The Premechanical Age: 3000 B.C. – 1450 A.D.
 The Mechanical Age: 1450 – 1840.
 The Electro-Mechanical Age: 1840 – 1940.
 Electronic 1940 - Present
 The premechanical
age is the earliest age of
information technology.
It can be defined as the
time between 3000 B.C.
and 1450 A.D.
 The earliest data processing equipment
were all manual-mechanical devices due to
the absence of electricity and adequate
industrial technology.
 is known as the first manual
data processing device. It was
developed in China in the twelfth
century A.D. The device has a frame
with beads strung on wires or rods
and arithmetic calculations are
performed by manipulating the
beads. The term abacus came from
the Greek word abax, meaning flat
surface.
 a Scottish mathematician who
became famous for his invention of
logarithms. The use of “logs” enable
him to reduce any multiplication
problem to a problem of addition. His
“bones” are a set of eleven rods with
numbers marked on them in such a
way that by simply placing the rods
side by side products and quotients
of large numbers can be obtained.
 an English Mathematician invented the slide rule. It
appeared in various forms in Europe during the seventeenth
century. It consists of two movable rulers placed side by side.
Each ruler is marked off in such a way that the actual
distances from the beginning of the ruler are proportional to
the logarithms of the numbers printed on the ruler. By sliding
the rulers, one can quickly multiply and divide.
 Three early
individuals who
pioneered the
concepts which
made modern day
computing
possible.
 a French mathematician and
experimental physicist, invented the
“arithmetic engine” or pascal’s
calculator. He was the first modern
scientist to develop and build a
calculator. The arithmetic engine or
pascaline is the first successful
mechanical calculator, which can add
and subtract numbers containing up to
eight digits.
 was a seventeenth-century
scientist who recognized the value
of building machines that could do
mathematical calculations and
save labor. He invented a
calculator which can multiply and
divide directly, as well as extract
square roots. He called it the
“stepped reckoner” Again.
 was the first to successfully use
punch cards both for storing
information and for controlling the
machine. He called it as Jacquard’s
loom. It became a great commercial
success in 1801 and became a
milestone in the development of the
textile industry and data processing.
 The mechanical age is when we first start
to see connections between our current
technology and its ancestors. The mechanical
age can be defined as the time between 1450
and 1840.
 An English inventor and
mathematician, , invented the
“difference engine”. It is a calculator
which can compile accurate
navigational and artillery tables. It is
designed to automate a standard
procedure for calculating the roots of
polynomials.
 Babbage also conceived the analytical engine in
1835. The machine has two basic components: memory
and mill.
The memory or storage unit holds all possible
numeric variables and the results of all previous
calculations. The “mill” processes data fed to it. The
machine has the capacity to compare quantities and
then decide which sequence of instructions to follow.
The results of processing in the “mill” permits changing
of already-stored value.
 The conditional point allows us to check to see
what the current value of s is. If s is greater than 3,
then we want the computer to output the value of s (4
in this case). If s is less than or equal to 3, then we want
the computer to output the value 0.
 The assistant of Charles Babbage who
helped him in the machine design of his
analytic engine was the daughter of the
English poet Lord Byron and the Countess of
Lovelace, Lady Augusta Ada King.
Her understanding of the machine
enabled her to create instruction routines
that could be fed into the computer. This
made her the first female programmer.
 developed the algebra of logic (Boolean
algebra), which expresses and processes problems
in logic by using variables. These variables could
only take the value of true or false.
 The electromechanical age heralded the
beginnings of telecommunications as we
know it today. This age can be defined roughly
as the time between 1840 and 1940.
 Technologies that form the basis for
modern-day telecommunication systems
include:
 The discovery of a reliable method of
creating and storing electricity (with a voltaic
battery) at the end of the 18th century made
possible a whole new method of
communicating information.
 The first major invention to use electricity
for communication purposes, made it possible
to transmit information over great distances
with great speed.
 The usefulness of the telegraph was
further enhanced by the development of
Morse Code in 1835 by Samuel Morse, an
American from Poughkeepsie, New York. It is
also a system that broke down information (in
this case, the alphabet) into bits (dots and
dashes)
 Alexander Graham Bell invented the
telephone in 1876. This was followed by the
discovery that electrical waves travel through
space and can produce an effect far from the
point at which they originated.
 invented the automatic punched
card tabulating machine in 1884 and the
patent was issued in 1889. he then
constructed an electromechanical
machine using perforated cards for use
in the first computerized US census in
1890. Herman Hollerith’s machine was
the first commercially successful data
processing machine.
 Howard Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard
University, decided to try to combine
Hollerith's punched card technology with
Babbage's dreams of a general-purpose,
"programmable" computing machine.
 The first large-scale
automatic digital computer
in the United States was the
Harvard Mark 1 created by
IBM in 1944.
 developed the first commercial mechanical adding machine in
1886.

a Russian immigrant who invented the Cathode Ray Tube

(CRT).

The designer of the very early binary computer was Konrad

Zuse. His work led a couple of Z machines ( from Z1 to Z4) which
eventually led to a series of machines built by the Siemens Corp.
 a mathematician from the Iowa
State Univesity, worked on a special
purpose electronic digital computer with
the help of a graduate assistant- Clifford
Berry. This machine was called Atanasoff-
Berry Computer (ABC). The machine,
which was powered by electricity and
used vacuum tubes, was designed to find
solutions to systems of linear equations.
 a British mathematician, created a
completely electronic computing device
called the Colossus. It was a huge version
of the ABC, designed to decode German
messages. It was also powered by
electricity and used vacuum tubes for its
computing circuitry. His “Turing machine”
laid the foundation for the development
of general-purpose programmable
computers.
 of the Harvard University, in collaboration with the IBM
engineers, constructed Mark I. The official name of Mark 1
was Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. It took five
years to build the size approximately 50 feet long, 8 feet high,
with 7,000,000 moving parts and hundred of miles of wiring.
Mark 1 could perform the four basic arithmetic operations,
locate stored information and process numbers up to 23
digits long.
 a rear admiral in the USNavy, was known for her
discovery of the first computer bug in the Harvard Mark II
computer. She found a moth on the wires of the computer
causing it to malfunction, hence the term “bug” and
“debugging” originated. The moth or the bug now resides in
the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.
In the 1960s, she became deeply involved in the
development of high-level languages particularly on the use
of Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), a
programming language for business.
 from the University of
Pennsylvania built the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Calculator
(ENIAC). It was the first general-
purpose electronic computer. The
speed of calculation is a thousand times
faster than the best mechanical
calculator. It has 20 accumulators,
wherein each one could perform 5,000
additions of ten-digit numbers in one
 An improvement of the ENIAc led to
the development of Electronic Discrete
Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC). It
only used 30% of the vacuum tubes in
ENIAC and was much faster in speed. It
was designed by John von Neumann with
the help of Mauchly and Eckert in June
1945. The EDVAC was considered the first
stored program computer.
 Maurice Wilkes, a British
scientist at Cambridge
University, completed the
Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Calculator (EDSAC)
two years before EDVAC was
finished, thereby taking the
claim of the first stored-program
computer.
 The first commercial computer,
Universal Automatic Computer
(UNIVAC), was designed by John
Mauchly and Presper Eckert. It was
successful in replacing the IBM
punched card equipment at the US
Bureau of Census using magnetic
tape as a buffer memory.
 a radar expert from the Britain Royal Radar
Establishment, presented a paper creating a new
technology called integrated circuit. He proposed
through his paper that a solid block of materials
may be used to connect electronic components
with no connecting wires.
 IBM introduced the first electronic-stored
program computer called 701 which was vacuum
tubes and was considered the first-generation
computer.
 produced the first successful high-level programming
language called Formula Translator (FORTRAN). FORTRAN is
often used to create scientific programs on microcomputers
and mainframes. The first successful FORTRAN program was
ran by Harlan Herrick.In the same year, Gene Amdahl also
developed the first operating system, which was used on the
IBM 704. IBM (1956) introduced the first hard drive for
mainframe called RAMAC 305, which has a total capacity of
5MB containing 50 pcs. of 24-in. diameter platters.
 Jack Kilby, of the Texas Instruments completed building
the first Integrated Circuit on a piece of germanium half an
inch long and thinner than a toothpick containing 5
components. Texas instruments announced the discovery of
the IC in 1959 and received a patent in 1964.
The first virtual memory machine developed by R.M.
Kilburn of the University of Manchester was called Atlas and
was installed in England by Feranti.
 built the first fully transistorized
supercomputer for Control Data
Corporation.
The Program Data Processor - 1
(PDP-1) 1960, was the first
minicomputer and the first
commercial computer equipped with
keyboard and monitor.
 Invented the mouse-pointing
device for computers called a mouse.
He received a patent for his invention
in late 1963 and demonstrated his
system keyboard, keypad, mouse and
windows at the Joint computer
conference in San Francisco Civic
Center in 1968.
 The Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
(BASIC) programming language was developed by John
Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz of Darthmouth in 1964.

The head of research and development for Fairchild

semiconductor, Gordon Moore, predicted that transistor
density on IC would double every twelve months for the next
ten years. He later revised his prediction in 1975, calling it
“Moore’s Law”.
 R. Wexelblat (1st Ph.D. in Computer
Science) was granted the first Computer
Science in Ph.D. at the University of
Pennsylvania in the same year. In 1966, AT&T
Bell Labs announced the invention of the
magnetic bubble.
 The first floppy disk was built
by Allan Shugart of IBM. It used
an 8-inch plastic disk coated with
iron oxide where data could be
stored.
 W. Pickette (Computers-on-a-chip) of the International
Research Corporation in San Martin, California designed the
computer-on-a-chip. It was developed later in 1970 at the
Intel Corporation through the help of Ted hoff, Stan Mazor,
Federico Faggin and the incorporators of Intel Corporation,
Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore as the first microprocessor
chip (4004 microprocessor)
 designed Pascal programming language to help students
learn how to program computers. It was purely a teaching
language which encouraged structures approach to
programming.

developed the C programming language. The 5¼

diskettes first appeared.
 The first electronic pocket calculator was
developed by Jack Kilby, Jerryman and Jim Van Tassel
of Texas Instrument

wrote a simple operating system for his PL/M

language and called it CP/M (Control
Program/Monitor). He further refined it to fit the Intel
8080-based systems.
 In November of 1973, Bob Metcalfe of Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) invented the
Ethernet computer connectivity system.

In 1976, Gary Kindall and his wife Dorothy

McEwen founded Intergalactic Digital Research,
which was later shortened to Digital Research.
 E. Roberts of Micro Instrumentation
Telemetry Systems (MITS) began building a
small computer based on the Intel 8088 chip,
which he planned to sell for as low as
US$500.00 The prototype was completed
within the year and was called Altair 8800. He
coined the word “personal computer” as a part
of the advertising campaign for the Altair. It
was considered the first personal computer.
The first Altair 8800 with 1 K memory was sold
for US$375.00.
 B. Gates and P. Allen from Harvard wrote the
first programming language for the Altair, which
was called BASIC and licensed it to MITS (Micro
Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) in exchange
for royalty payment. They later founded Microsoft
and registered it as a company called “ Microsoft”
in November of 1976.
 finished the computer circuit
board of the Apple 1 Computer in
1976. They formed a company
called Apple Computer Company
on April Fool’s Day, 1976. While
Steve Wozniak designed the
Apple computer, Steve Jobs
promoted it.
 a Harvard Business School student, with the help of
Robert Frankston (a computer programmer), and Dan Fylstra
(software publisher), developed the first electronics
spreadsheet program called VisiCalc. It was released for the
Apple computer and became so popular that microcomputer
purchase increased just so they could use the software.

Texas Instruments introduced the Speak-and-Spell

educational toys featuring digital speech synthesis in 1978.
 wrote the program Wordstar, which became one of the most
popular and best selling word processors during that time and was
released by Micro Pro. It is a program that aids the user in producing
reports, letters, papers and manuscript with ease. In relation, GYPSY
is one of the first word processors termed “WYSIWYG” (what you see
is what you get) developed by Xerox PARC in 1975 which runs on the
Alto personal computer.
Microsoft Disk Operating System (MSDOS) 1980, IBM chose
Microsoft to create an operating system to be used for its soon-to-be
launched Personal computer.
 Dr. B. Stroustrup of Bell laboratories created
C++ in 1980.
 IBM PC, head of the IBM design
team for PC, introduced the IBM personal
computer, which can be used in the
home, office and schools. This paved the
way to the PC revolution. IBM PC clones,
which are more affordable, appeared in
the market, hence the number of PCs in
use increased from 2 million to 5.5
million within a span of one year.
 The IBM PC computers were bundled with
the MS-DOS and PC-DOS for the IBM PC
clones.

Lotus 1-2-3 (1983) became the

spreadsheet software choice for
microcomputers, replacing VisiCalc.
 was introduced to the computer world as
an alternative to the IBM PC. Its operating
system has a Graphical User Interface (GUI),
which allows users to move screen icons
instead of typing instructions.
 introduced a new kind of operating system. Although it
still features DOS commands and functions, Windows has a
graphical user interface (GUI), which made it easier for users
to operate the computer. Better versions (windows 95, 98,
2000, XP and others) came out later.

Aldus introduced PageMaker for the Macintosh. This

started the desktop publishing era. It later introduced in 1987
another version of PageMaker, the IBM PC and Compatibles.
 created the technology underlying the World
Wide Web (www). He proposed a global network
of stored documents that would allow physics
researchers to access and exchange information.
This was born in Geneva, Switzerland and at the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics (French
acronym is CERN).
created the search engine called Yahoo!

O.J. Dahl and k. Nygaard of Norway invented the Object-

Oriented Programming, which is the most widely used
programming model today. They were awarded the “Nobel
Prize of Computing” on February 5, 2002.
 M. Andreessen with the help of colleagues, developed a
program called Mosaic, which allowed the user to move
around the web by clicking words and symbols. He formed a
company called Netscape Communications Corporation
which marketed the Netscape web browser.

Deep Blue, (1997) an IBM machine that can make 100

million chess points per second, was able to beat Garry
Kasparov, the reigning chess champion, in a six-game match
in the US.
 Before the turn of the century, computer experts
warned about the possible inability of computer
programs to handle the date change. Early
programmers allowed only two digits to represent the
year. The year 2000 or 2K problem caused may users
and corporations to prepare. While some problems
occurred, no significant difficulties were encountered
when the date change happened.
 Honda Corporation of Japan developed a
robot that can walk like a human, go up, and
down the stairs, greet people and do some simple
tasks, This is a breakthrough in artificial
intelligence and robotics.