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. The question remains today as open as this one: What makes a machine a computer? Click Enter. Login Profile. Es En. Economy Humanities Science Technology. Digital World.
Multimedia OpenMind books Authors. Featured author. Latest book. Work in the Age of Data. Start Who Invented the First Computer? You might be surprised to learn that many computer pioneers struggled to get funding for their ideas and faced skepticism from their contemporaries.
Early computers were actually people, not machines — it was a job title. The word dates back to It is an ancient-Geek, hand-powered mechanical device.
Archeologists believe it was used to calculate eclipses and other astronomical events. Due to its complexity, many speculate that it had several, less complex predecessors. Generally, these fulfilled a single purpose. From until his death in , he designed 3 computers , but never actually constructed any of them, due to lack of funding.
In Babbage started working on a Difference Engine its purpose was to compute polynomial functions. If completed it would have had some 25, parts, weighed 13, kg 15 short tons and been 2. Between — Babbage created drawings for the Difference Engine No. Amazingly, it worked! It took 6 years to build, weighs The Analytical Engine , a later Babbage computer design, would have had a whopping bytes of memory! Punch cards were used as input, based on the Jacquard Loom punch card system , invented at the turn of the 19th century.
He saw mechanical computers as a way to remove error. As we all know, necessity is the mother of invention and never was that more true that during WW2! During this period, electromechanical computer technology speed rocketed. Early electromechanical computers were a sort of hybrid between modern electrical computers and analog computers. Electric switches drove mechanical relays, although parts still wore out quickly, electrical switches could open and close around 1, times faster than mechanical ones, making electromechanical computers much, much faster.
At the time the Japanese also had an automated, torpedo firing computer on their submarines. However, it was not capable of tracking a target. In , Germany, Zuse began work on the Z1 : a mechanical calculator.
It worked on a binary system and was fed paper tape. It was also pretty slow. However, with a little help from his friend Helmut Freier, an electrical engineer, this formed the basis of the Z2…. The Z2 was an electromechanical computer that was capable of slightly more varied functions.
It took 0. It had a monitor, keyboard and a 21 inch, flatscreen! The user could write and feed programs using a strip of film. The Colossus computer was a fully programmable, electronic, digital computer , developed to aid British codebreakers in decrypting German radio telegraphic traffic.
Lisa is the first commercial personal computer with a graphical user interface GUI. It was thus an important milestone in computing as soon Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh would soon adopt the GUI as their user interface, making it the new paradigm for personal computing. The success of the Portable inspired many other early IBM-compatible computers. Compaq's success launched a market for IBM-compatible computers that by had achieved an percent share of the personal computer market.
The Macintosh was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface and was based on the Motorola microprocessor. The PC Jr. While the PC Jr. It also included more memory and accommodated high-density 1. By the early s, Dell became one of the leading computer retailers. It developed a very loyal following while add-on components allowed it to be upgraded easily.
The inside of the Amiga case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers, including Jay Miner as well as the paw print of his dog Mitchy. At 4 million operations per second and 4 kilobytes of memory, the gave PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and minicomputers. The chip brought with it the introduction of a bit architecture, a significant improvement over the bit architecture of previous microprocessors.
It had two operating modes, one that mirrored the segmented memory of older x86 chips, allowing full backward compatibility, and one that took full advantage of its more advanced technology. It performed 2 million instructions per second, but other RISC-based computers worked significantly faster.
Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corporation moves artificial intelligence a step forward when he develops the controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine CM The machine used up to 65, one-bit processors and could complete several billion operations per second. Each processor had its own small memory linked with others through a flexible network that users altered by reprogramming rather than rewiring. Using this system, the machine could work faster than any other at the time on a problem that could be parceled out among the many processors.
One of Britain's leading computer companies, Acorn continued the Archimedes line, which grew to nearly twenty different models, into the s. The computer he created, an all-black cube was an important innovation.
This object-oriented multitasking operating system was groundbreaking in its ability to foster rapid development of software applications. VTech, founded in Hong Kong, had been a manufacturer of Pong-like games and educational toys when they introduce the Laser computer.
The RISC microprocessor had a bit integer arithmetic and logic unit the part of the CPU that performs operations such as addition and subtraction , a bit floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz.
The chips remained similar in structure to their predecessors, the chips. What set the apart was its optimized instruction set, with an on-chip unified instruction and data cache and an optional on-chip floating-point unit.
Combined with an enhanced bus interface unit, the microprocessor doubled the performance of the without increasing the clock rate. Apple had initially included a handle in their Macintosh computers to encourage users to take their Macs on the go, though not until five years after the initial introduction does Apple introduce a true portable computer.
Sales were weaker than projected, despite being widely praised by the press for its active matrix display, removable trackball, and high performance. The line was discontinued less than two years later. It would serve as the model for several other significant multi-processor systems that would be among the fastest in the world.
Based on Charles Babbage's second design for a mechanical calculating engine, a team at the Science Museum in London sets out to prove that the design would have worked as planned. Apple's Macintosh Portable meets with little success in the marketplace and leads to a complete redesign of Apple's line of portable computers.
All three PowerBooks introduced featured a built-in trackball, internal floppy drive, and palm rests, which would eventually become typical of s laptop design. The PowerBook was the entry-level machine, while the PowerBook was more powerful and had a larger memory. The PowerBook was the high-end model, featuring an active matrix display, faster processor, as well as a floating point unit. The PowerBook line of computers was discontinued in Based on the Touchstone Delta computer Intel had built at Caltech, the Paragon is a parallel supercomputer that uses 2, later increased to more than four thousand Intel i processors.
More than one hundred Paragons were installed over the lifetime of the system, each costing as much as five million dollars.
The Paragon at Caltech was named the fastest supercomputer in the world in Paragon systems were used in many scientific areas, including atmospheric and oceanic flow studies, and energy research. Apple enters the handheld computer market with the Newton. The handwriting recognition software was much maligned for inaccuracy.
The Newton line never performed as well as hoped and was discontinued in The Pentium introduced several advances that made programs run faster such as the ability to execute several instructions at the same time and support for graphics and music. Using dual PowerPC CPUs, and featuring a large variety of peripheral ports, the first devices were used for software development. While it did not sell well, the operating system, Be OS, retained a loyal following even after Be stopped producing hardware in after less than 2, machines were produced.
Officially known as the Track Write, the automatically expanding full-sized keyboard used by the ThinkPad is designed by inventor John Karidis. The keyboard was comprised of three roughly triangular interlocking pieces, which formed a full-sized keyboard when the laptop was opened -- resulting in a keyboard significantly wider than the case. Palm Inc. Sony had manufactured and sold computers in Japan, but the VAIO signals their entry into the global computer market.
The first VAIO, a desktop computer, featured an additional 3D interface on top of the Windows 95 operating system as a way of attracting new users. The VAIO line of computers would be best known for laptops were designed with communications and audio-video capabilities at the forefront, including innovative designs that incorporated TV and radio tuners, web cameras, and handwriting recognition.
The line was discontinued in Until the year , it was the world's fastest supercomputer, able to achieve peak performance of 1. The machine was noted for its ease-of-use and included a 'manual' that contained only a few pictures and less than 20 words. The camera had a maximum resolution of 0. The J-Phone line would quickly expand, releasing a flip-phone version just a month later. Cameras would become a significant part of most phones within a year, and several countries have even passed laws regulating their use.
A consortium of aerospace, energy, and marine science agencies undertook the project, and the system was built by NEC around their SX-6 architecture.
To protect it from earthquakes, the building housing it was built using a seismic isolation system that used rubber supports. The Earth Simulator was listed as the fastest supercomputer in the world from to Leaving Palm Inc. After retiring their initial Visor series of PDAs, Handspring introduced the Treo line of smartphones, designed with built-in keyboards, cameras, and the Palm operating system. The Treo sold well, and the line continued until Handspring was purchased by Palm in With a distinctive anodized aluminum case, and hailed as the first true bit personal computer, the Apple G5 is the most powerful Macintosh ever released to that point.
While larger than the previous G4 towers, the G5 had comparatively limited space for expansion. Harkening back to the hobbyist era of personal computing in the s, Arduino begins as a project of the Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea, Italy. Each credit card-sized Arduino board consisted of an inexpensive microcontroller and signal connectors which made Arduinos ideal for use in any application connecting to or monitoring the outside world.
Nearly a quarter century after IBM launched their PC in , they had become merely another player in a crowded marketplace. Lenovo became the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world with the acquisition, later also acquiring IBM's server line of computers. Named in honor of the space shuttle which broke-up on re-entry, the Columbia supercomputer is an important part of NASA's return to manned spaceflight after the disaster.
Columbia was used in space vehicle analysis, including studying the Columbia disaster, but also in astrophysics, weather and ocean modeling. At its introduction, it was listed as the second fastest supercomputer in the world and this single system increased NASA's supercomputing capacity fold. The first offering to the public required the buyer to purchase one to be given to a child in the developing world as a condition of acquiring a machine for themselves.
By , over 2. Many companies have attempted to release electronic reading systems dating back to the early s. Online retailer Amazon released the Kindle, one of the first to gain a large following among consumers.
The first Kindle featured wireless access to content via Amazon. The first release proved so popular there was a long delay in delivering systems on release. Follow-on versions of the Kindle added further audio-video capabilities.
Apple launches the iPhone - a combination of web browser, music player and cell phone - which could download new functionality in the form of "apps" applications from the online Apple store.
The touchscreen enabled smartphone also had built-in GPS navigation, high-definition camera, texting, calendar, voice dictation, and weather reports.
Apple introduces their first ultra notebook — a light, thin laptop with high-capacity battery. The Air incorporated many of the technologies that had been associated with Apple's MacBook line of laptops, including integrated camera, and Wi-Fi capabilities.
To reduce its size, the traditional hard drive was replaced with a solid-state disk, the first mass-market computer to do so. The Roadrunner is the first computer to reach a sustained performance of 1 petaflop one thousand trillion floating point operations per second.
It was used to model the decay of the US nuclear arsenal, analyze financial data, and render 3D medical images in real-time. The Jaguar was used to study climate science, seismology, and astrophysics applications.
It was the fastest computer in the world from November to June Since the release of the Macintosh in , Apple has placed emphasis on high-resolution graphics and display technologies.
With a screen resolution of up to pixels-per-inch PPI , Retina displays approached the limit of pixel visibility to the human eye. The display also used In Plane Switching IPS technology, which allowed for a wider viewing angle and improved color accuracy. The machines were used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to run massive solar energy simulations, as well as some of the most complex molecular studies ever undertaken.
The iPad combines many of the popular capabilities of the iPhone, such as built-in high-definition camera, access to the iTunes Store, and audio-video capabilities, but with a nine-inch screen and without the phone. Apps, games, and accessories helped spur the popularity of the iPad and led to its adoption in thousands of different applications from movie making, creating art, making music, inventory control and point-of-sale systems, to name but a few.
Despite using 98, PowerPC chips, Sequoia's relatively low power usage made it unusually efficient. Scientific and defense applications included studies of human electrophysiology, nuclear weapon simulation, human genome mapping, and global climate change. Conceived in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, this credit card-sized computer features ease of use and simplicity making it highly popular with students and hobbyists.
In October , the one millionth Raspberry Pi was shipped. Only one month later, another one million Raspberry Pis were delivered. The University of Michigan Micro Mote M3 is the smallest computer in the world at the time of its completion. Three types of the M3 were available — two types that measured either temperature or pressure and one that could take images. The motes were powered by a tiny battery and could gain light energy through a photocell, which was enough to feed the infinitesimally small amount of energy a mote consumes 1 picowatt.
An ecologist, for example, could sprinkle thousands of motes from the air onto a field and measure soil and air temperature, moisture, and sunlight, giving them accurate real-time data about the environment. Building a computer into the watch form factor has been attempted many times but the release of the Apple Watch leads to a new level of excitement.
Incorporating a version of Apple's iOS operating system, as well as sensors for environmental and health monitoring, the Apple Watch was designed to be incorporated into the Apple environment with compatibility with iPhones and Mac Books.
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