Computers :: essays research papers

This paper is round the ready reckoner. To twenty-four hour period computers are uptaked by hundreds of cardinals of people. There have been many advances in the computer. The computer used to weigh 30 tons and fill up warehouse size rooms, but today can be as light as 3 pounds and fit in a persons pocket.There were essentially three times the computer was mentioned. One as a automatonlike computing device, in about 500 BC The other as a concept in 1833, and the third as the modern day computer in 1946. The number 1 mechanical calculator was called the abacus. The abacus is a is a string of moving beads.The prime(prenominal) concept of the modern computer was first outlined in 1833 by the British mathematician Charles Babbage. His outline contained all of todays features in a computer today. Those features are memory, a control unit, and output devices. even out though Babbage worked on the machine for over 40 years he never actual saw it work. The modern computer grew ou t of knifelike research efforts mounted during World War II. The military needed smart ballistics calculators, and British cryptographers needed machines to help break the German inscrutable codes.Early as the 1940s the German Inventor, Konrad Zuse, produced the first operational computer. It was used in aircraft and missile designs, but the German government would not let him improve the machine so it never reached its maximum capability. Two engineers called John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr. from the University of pappa constructed a calculator. Its construction was an enormous feat of engineering. The 30-ton machine was 18 feet steep and 80 feet long, and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes linked by 500 miles of wiring. This calculator performed 100,000 operations per second, and its first operational test included calculations that helped determine the feasibility of the total heat bomb. Computers were finally make to a smaller size in 1958 by Jack Kilby. He used less expensive silicon chips, this made it possible to cram as many as 10 million components on 1 chip. Another big step in the computer chip was made by American Engineer Marcian E. Hoff. He combine the uses of a computer into 1 tiny silicon chip which he called the microprocessor. This microprocessor was called the Intel 4004. By the mid 1970s the microprocessor or microchip reduced the cost of computers. The first affordable desktop computer designed specifically for personal use was called the Altair 8800 and was sold by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems in 1974.