The Historical Evolution of Computers – How We managed to Build Them

From the numerical abacus to smartphones, computing machines have recorded technological progress. In direct alignment with technology, people have promoted the evolution of all branches of the human intellect, taking off every standard from engineering to health. It is almost inconceivable that the modern world can stand without computers’ uninterrupted operation. If computers go off for a few days, everything will likely collapse. The loss of digital information will be translated into a tidal wave of chaos with losses in the economy and everyday life. Let’s trace the most important landmarks through a photographic timeline with explanatory references.

The Abacus of Antiquity

The Roman Abacus consisted of 16 grooves with a different number of beads each. The beads represented the units, the fives, and so on, in an attempt to ”code” the Romans’ known pentadic and decimal numbering system. In addition to the Roman Abacus, there was also the Chinese Abacus. In Ancient Greece, there seem to have been similar creations. For example, the Chinese abacus was broadly similar to the Roman one. However, it had a different construction and the purpose of using the decimal and the hexadecimal numbering system. In a competition between the Chinese Abacus and an electric computer, on November 12, 1946, the abacus won 4 out of 5 tests conducted.

Pascal’s calculator came many years later

In 1645, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal constructed the first true calculator, which was called Pascaline. It was a small construction and fit comfortably on a table. Pascaline performed only two operations: addition and subtraction.

Almost 200 years afterward

A punched card or Hollerith card was a piece of hard paper containing digital information, which was encoded in the presence or absence of holes in predetermined positions. Punched cards were widely used in the 19th century to control and automate textile looms. At the beginning of the 20th century, their use was adapted to the need to store settings and commands for programming the first computers.

Innovations come one next to another

Around 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas patented the first mechanical-type digital calculator, which also received widespread use. He could perform additions, subtractions, complex multiplications and divisions, and even rapidly. Multiplication of an 8-digit number by another 8-digit was performed within 18 seconds, and the work was based mainly on Leibniz’s earlier work.

The contribution of Lukyanov

In 1936, Vladimir Lukyanov built an analog water computer, the first computer to solve partial differential equations. Water computers were widely used in the Soviet Union for large-scale modeling up until the 1980s.

ENIAC at last

In 1946, John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert developed ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. The US military cooperated with the two researchers and ensured the financing of their work, as they needed a fast computer. These calculations were becoming increasingly complex while the pressures caused by World War II were suffocating. ENIAC is considered the first reprogrammed digital computer integrated by Turing and capable of solving a wide range of numerical problems. This feature also established it as the world’s first general-purpose computer. It was significantly faster than any other electromechanical computer, as it could perform 5,000 additions per second.

We finally got to Apple

The Apple I was an early attempt to build and dispose of a personal computer. Steve Wozniak originally designed it for his personal use. However, his friend Steve Jobs suggested they manufacture and sell more copies. What distinguished the Apple I from the competition was the ability to connect to a keyboard and display and that it was delivered in a fully assembled form, not just as an assembly kit. This is how the historic Apple company was born in a garage in Los Altos, California.
Computers’ indisputable necessity for the sustainability of the current socio-economic model also demonstrates the importance of their rapid technological evolution over time.

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