When was first computer invented

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. The question remains today as open as this one: What makes a machine a computer?

Click Enter. Login Profile. The following brief history of computing is a timeline of how computers evolved from their humble beginnings to the machines of today that surf the Internet , play games and stream multimedia in addition to crunching numbers. Early computers would use similar punch cards. The project, funded by the English government, is a failure.

More than a century later, however, the world's first computer was actually built. He establishes a company that would ultimately become IBM. The central concept of the modern computer was based on his ideas.

Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, attempts to build the first computer without gears, cams, belts or shafts. This marks the first time a computer is able to store information on its main memory. Considered the grandfather of digital computers, it fills a foot by foot room and has 18, vacuum tubes.

They discovered how to make an electric switch with solid materials and no need for a vacuum. Thomas Johnson Watson Jr. Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in for his work. This marks the evolution of the computer from a specialized machine for scientists and mathematicians to technology that is more accessible to the general public. 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. Unlike modern computers, it was programmed with a series of switches and plugs. Given our reliance on computers today, it is hard for us to imagine, but Turing had an extremely hard time convincing his contemporaries of the importance of his work.

Like so many early computer scientists he struggled to get the funding he needed. Note: The Colossus computer is not to be confused with the Bombe: an electromechanical device, also designed by Turing and used to decode Enigma, in His work did not stop at the end of WW2! After the war, he worked at Manchester University where he played a key role in developing early computing technology and wrote several papers, that still define the way with think about computer science to this day.

Although he might not be the man who invented computers, Turin is certainly the man who invented computer science! It lacked many of the functionalities of modern computers; it was designed for one specialist task and was not Turing complete. It was fully reprogrammable and so, able to solve a complex number of problems. It could take several days to program because it was programmed via external switches and dials.

The ENIAC took 20 seconds to complete its first calculation, a mechanical computer of the time would have taken 40 hours. By the time it was decommissioned, in , it had been used to solve problems as diverse as wind tunnels, random number generators, and weather prediction.