The History of the P.C. (Personal Computer)
Martha Russ
John Mauchly and Presper Eckert was the
first to design the computer. They are from the
University of
Pennsylvania. The name of it was ENIAC, which stood
for Electronic Numerical Intergrator and Computer. It filled 40 ,nine feet tall
cabinets and had about 18,000 vacuum tubes with miles of wiring this was designed for a weapon of war. It could calculate
trajectories for WWII artillery guns but because of it operating under the army
secrecy it was little known to the public only by computing circles, it was
eventually buried
in history under controversy, jealousy,
and lawsuits. ENIAC, Eckert, and Mauchly were forgotten. They also discovered
the first Computer Company, but neither found fame nor fortune because both men
were poor businessmen and lousy marketers. The team that built the first
computer ate, slept, and lived with it. They ran into so many problems from how
to combine vacuum tubes together so they could count numbers without making
mistakes all the way down to how they could make supplies last. Finally in 1946
this thing was completed
In 1947 an invention
was made to replace the values in ENIAC with a better part called the
transistor. But the computer was
still big and bulky and only used mainly in Universities and governments. This
started a new section of computers, which began, in the late 1950 and early
1960s
In 1943 IBM helped
Harvard
University design a computer. It was designed to crack the German
coding system that was where IBM got their start for computers.
In
1958 Jack St. Claire invented the microchip and
between him and IBM they furthered the integrated circuit and made itpossible for the computers to enter small businesses. These computers were called minicomputers.
In 1971, Intel produced the first microprocessor with a small chip that could do
much of the computers processing; it also involved a chip called a ram. Which
both of these together stood for Kilobits of memory on a single chip thus
allowing the micro to be even faster and better than ever before. This
invention was so great that it
allowed bigger computers to be even faster and more powerful like
Supercomputers. It also made available for the first personal computer called
the MITS Altair that was released in 1974 , and
then soon to follow was the Apple I & II, Commodore PET, and the IBM
PC that was released in 1981. After that was the internet.
The first stages of the internet started in 1969 by
the US Department of Defense it was called the ARPANET.People could put their
ideas on paper and let other ones read it they could also comment on it. This
was called Request for Comments in the late 1970 universities and non-military
people were allowed to use it and by 1972 it had expanded into another stage
called International connections but it was still just another way for
computers to talk to each other. It was’nt until 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee
wanted a way to share information with other Physicist about their research and
he invented the World Wide
Web but you could only do text. Graphics with a browser came after that and was
called NCSA Mosaics.
Still the only computers that could connect were
Universities and other big organizations that could afford
cable between each other to carry the data.
In 1993 the graphical
interface opened up the Internet and allowed people to get on the Internet with
their computers using an Internet provider. This allowed you to get on the net
and to access what we call e-mail which allows you to communicate with others
without using the
US postal service and in a matter of seconds have a reply.
But during those
times no one stopped to think what the millennium would be like. As our world
has became revolved around them. We ponder about what is ahead for us. Will the
New Year come in with an ease or will there be one problem after the other.
Will we have lights, water, phones, etc? Only
January 1st
2000 will tell.