When was the first computer made

In , the first automatic computing machine was designed and developed by Charles Babbage, which was the Difference Engine. It had the ability to calculate numerous sets of numbers and generating hard copies of the results. Ada Lovelace helped the Babbage to developed the Difference Engine.

The first computer by Babbage is considered the programmer, and he also wrote notes and sketches about the Difference Engine. Inappropriately, Babbage was unable to complete a full-portion functional type of this machine, as he had no sufficient fund. Later the printing mechanism was also completed by the London Science Museum. In , the Analytical Engine that was the first general mechanical computer, was proposed by Charles Babbage.

It was the first general-purpose computer concept, which contained basic flow control, Arithmetic Logic Unit ALU , integrated memory, etc.

Unfortunately, due to less funding, Charles Babbage also was unable to build this computer while he was alive. Henry Babbage Charles Babbage's youngest son completed this computer and performed basic calculations too.

In mid- and , German Konrad Zuse created the Z1 in his parents' living room. It was the first really functional modern computer and also considered the first electromechanical binary programmable computer.

In , Alan Turing first proposed the Turing machine and became the basis for computing and computers. The Turing machine was able to print symbols in a manner that simulates a person following a sequence of logical instructions. Tommy Flowers developed the first electric programmable computer that was known as Colossus, and in , it was demonstrated for the first time. It was developed to help for reading encrypted German messages of the British code breakers. More than vacuum tubes were used by the Atanasoff-Berry Computer for digital computation.

It had no CPU as it was not able to programming. Presper Eckert was invalid. Presper Eckert started to invent the ENIAC, and it was continuing in the development phase but not completed until It used about 18, vacuum tubes and occupied about 1, square feet, weighing almost 50 tons.

But, according to the judge ruled, the first digital computer was ABC computer. The first electronically-stored program that was able to electronically store and execute a program written by Kilburn, which can calculate the highest proper factor of an integer with the help of repeated subtraction instead of division.

On 21 June , Kilburn's program was executed. It performed its first calculation on 6 May It was designed with an implementation of tic-tac-toe screened on a 6-inch cathode ray tube. Another computer, Manchester Mark 1, was able to run stored programs. Also, at the Victoria University of Manchester, the first version of the Mark 1 computer was built in April that was able to run the program.

Later, it was used to run a program for nine hours without error to search for Mersenne primes on 16 and 17 June. The Z4 was the first commercial computer developed by Konrad Zuse in In , the first computer company was founded by John Mauchly and J.

Presper Eckert, which was the Electronic Controls Company. Furthermore, the first commercial scientific computer was introduced by IBM to publicly on 7 April It was a revolutionary computer. In , demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there was a computer invented, which was TX-0 Transistorized Experimental computer and considered the first transistorized computer.

It was the first minicomputer. 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.

Focused on making it work, Zuse was never aware that he had in his hands the first universal computing machine. It depends. It used 53 vacuum tubes and hundreds of germanium diodes, with a magnetic drum for memory. Tracks on the drum did the mathematical integration. The Manchester Mark I used more than 1, vacuum tubes and occupied an area the size of a medium room.

The , designed by ERA but built by Remington-Rand, was intended for high-speed computing and stored 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, one of the earliest magnetic storage devices and a technology which ERA had done much to perfect in its own laboratories. The design packed vacuum tubes into a relatively compact 12 square feet.

The hobbyist magazine Radio Electronics publishes Edmund Berkeley's design for the Simon 1 relay computer from to Let us call it Simon, because of its predecessor, Simple Simon Simon is so simple and so small in fact that it could be built to fill up less space than a grocery-store box; about four cubic feet. It was built in Washington DC as a test-bed for evaluating components and systems as well as for setting computer standards.

It was also one of the first computers to use all-diode logic, a technology more reliable than vacuum tubes. SWAC was used to solve problems in numerical analysis, including developing climate models and discovering five previously unknown Mersenne prime numbers. A British government contract spurred its initial development but a change in government led to loss of funding and the second and only other Mark I was sold at a major loss to the University of Toronto, where it was re-christened FERUT.

The Univac 1 is the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. One biblical scholar even used a Univac 1 to compile a concordance to the King James version of the Bible. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons went into business manufacturing computers to meet the growing need for data processing systems in business.

The Institute of Advanced Study IAS computer is a multi-year research project conducted under the overall supervision of world-famous mathematician John von Neumann. The IAS computer was designed for scientific calculations and it performed essential work for the US atomic weapons program. The bit machine used 92 point-contact transistors and diodes.

During three years of production, IBM sells 19 s to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government. Programmer Arthur Samuels used the to write the first computer program designed to play checkers.

It was named after John von Neumann, a world famous mathematician and computer pioneer of the day. Johnniac was used for scientific and engineering calculations.

It was also repeatedly expanded and improved throughout its year lifespan. Many innovative programs were created for Johnniac, including the time-sharing system JOSS that allowed many users to simultaneously access the machine. IBM establishes the as its first mass-produced computer, with the company selling in just one year. The Model was also highly popular in universities, where a generation of students first learned programming.

Over 30 were completed, including one delivered to Australia. Typically, computer users of the time fed their programs into a computer using punched cards or paper tape. Doug Ross wrote a memo advocating direct access in February. Ross contended that a Flexowriter -- an electrically-controlled typewriter -- connected to an MIT computer could function as a keyboard input device due to its low cost and flexibility.

An experiment conducted five months later on the MIT Whirlwind computer confirmed how useful and convenient a keyboard input device could be.

For easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube. DEC is founded initially to make electronic modules for test, measurement, prototyping and control markets. Headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts, Digital Equipment Corporation, took over 8, square foot leased space in a nineteenth century mill that once produced blankets and uniforms for soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

The mill is still in use today as an office park Clock Tower Place today. The is built on a 'building block' concept which allows it to be highly flexible for many different uses and could simultaneously control up to 63 tape drives—very useful for large databases of information. For many business users, quick access to this huge storage capability outweighed its relatively slow processing speed.

Customers included US military as well as industry. Its task was to detect incoming Soviet bombers and direct interceptor aircraft to destroy them. Operators directed actions by touching a light gun to the SAGE airspace display. Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar! More than 50 PDP-1s were sold. It was sold exclusively in Japan, but could process alphabetic and Japanese kana characters. Only about thirty NEACs were sold.

It managed Japan's first on-line, real-time reservation system for Kinki Nippon Railways in The last one was decommissioned in At the top of the line was the Model , also known as "Stretch.

The mainframe, the first in the series, replaces earlier vacuum tube technology with smaller, more reliable transistors. By the mids, nearly half of all computers in the world were IBM s. Minuteman missiles use transistorized computers to continuously calculate their position in flight. The computer had to be rugged and fast, with advanced circuit design and reliable packaging able to withstand the forces of a missile launch.

When the Minuteman I was decommissioned, some universities received these computers for use by students. The US Navy Tactical Data System uses computers to integrate and display shipboard radar, sonar and communications data. This real-time information system began operating in the early s. System control was provided through the Atlas Supervisor, which some consider to be the first true operating system.

The Control Data Corporation CDC performs up to 3 million instructions per second —three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM supercomputer. The retained the distinction of being the fastest computer in the world until surpassed by its successor, the CDC , in Instead of designing a custom controller, two young engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation DEC -- Gordon Bell and Edson de Castro -- do something unusual: they develop a small, general purpose computer and program it to do the job.

A later version of that machine became the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. Because of its speed, small size, and reasonable cost, the PDP-8 was sold by the thousands to manufacturing plants, small businesses, and scientific laboratories around the world. At the same press conference, IBM also announced 40 completely new peripherals for the new family. Operational by , it was not the first computerized reservation system, but it was well publicized and became very influential.

It was the world's first commercial bit minicomputer and systems were sold. This printing programmable calculator was made from discrete transistors and an acoustic delay-line memory.

The Programma could do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, as well as calculate square roots. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems. The A also marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product. A year later, it steered Apollo 11 to the lunar surface.

Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes into the display and keyboard unit DSKY. The AGC was one of the earliest uses of integrated circuits, and used core memory, as well as read-only magnetic rope memory.

The astronauts were responsible for entering more than 10, commands into the AGC for each trip between Earth and the Moon. The Nova line of computers continued through the s, and influenced later systems like the Xerox Alto and Apple 1. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its byte memory.

In , after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors. Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket. They did.

The HP helped HP become one of the most dominant companies in the handheld calculator market for more than two decades. The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel , appears in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the had transistors and could perform up to 90, operations per second in four-bit chunks.

Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture. Under the direction of engineer Dr. Based on the Intel microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection.

In , Truong sold R2E to Bull. Designed by Don Lancaster, the TV Typewriter is an easy-to-build kit that can display alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A cassette tape interface provided supplementary storage for text. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the s. Wang was a successful calculator manufacturer, then a successful word processor company.

The Wang makes it a successful computer company, too. Wang sold the primarily through Value Added Resellers, who added special software to solve specific customer problems. The first commercially advertised US computer based on a microprocessor the Intel , the Scelbi has 4 KB of internal memory and a cassette tape interface, as well as Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces.

Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. In , Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market. The Alto is a groundbreaking computer with wide influence on the computer industry. It was based on a graphical user interface using windows, icons, and a mouse, and worked together with other Altos over a local area network.

It could also share files and print out documents on an advanced Xerox laser printer. For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders. Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor.

The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. Southwest Technical Products is founded by Daniel Meyer as DEMCO in the s to provide a source for kit versions of projects published in electronics hobbyist magazines. Of the dozens of different SWTP kits available, the proved the most popular.

Tailored for online transaction processing, the Tandem is one of the first commercial fault-tolerant computers.