In What Year Was The First Computer Invented ?
Submitted by: TigerEye
The computer has become the machine that many in the Western World have come to rely on for every day life. The computer as most consider it was invented not that long ago. Some call the abacus a computer but the purist will not agree with that. There were precursors to what most today would call a computer but that is not the focus of this article. The item we will talk about here is that item that most resembles what an average person ( not a scientist ) today would call a computer.
Most consider it to be World War Two when the first computer was invented. It was a machine invented to calculate the trajectories of missiles. This was the job of eighty women before it was invented. To take over the mathematics jobs of these eighty women a machine named the ENIAC was born. It was created by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchley at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 until 1946. It was created with funds from the military. It was a monstrosity and weighed somewhere from thirty to fifty tons. It used something called vacuum tubes. The number of tubes used were 18,000. The machine took up 167 square meters ( 1,800 square feet ) of space. These tubes were the forerunners of the transistor which is still being used today in computers. The tubes were the electronic devices that made the mathematic calculations for the trajectories of the missiles.
The ENIAC was programmed by a team of six women. Their names were Ruth Teitelbaum, Frances Spence, Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik and Kay Mauchley Antonelli. These six women were the ones to invent the field of programming, being skilled in mathematics and logistics. Ms Holberton went on to be the person to lead a group to develop the first language to allow programs to be run on more than one computer. The name of the language was COBOL, which stands for "Common Business Oriented Language". The acronym ENIAC stands for "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer".
The ENIAC could compute the trajectory of a missile or bomb in less than one minute. It took humans about two days to do the same job. This is the reason computers exist.
They do things to save us time or effort. In the long run, they save us money when we learn how to put them to work for us. Some other things the ENIAC could do was add, subtract, multiply, and discover square roots of numbers. It could handle five thousand computations per second. It had a memory that could handle twenty numbers that each had ten digits. The ENIAC was programmed by workers who rewired it. At the time it impressed many who would come in contact with it. Today it is weak and vastly oversized and overpowered.
In fact the ENIAC is now a museum piece, housed at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, District of Colombia. While this dinosaur is now put to rest, the computer goes on to become a device to control everyday life. It becomes smaller and smaller as the years go by. It is still controlled electronically, but uses magnitudes less power and space.
When was the first computer invented ?
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1: In What Year Was The First Computer Invented ?Word Count: 538 Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 Time: 1:54 AM
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