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| Nothing changes modern life better than computer. Today computers do much more than simply compute. To fully understand and appreciate the impact computers have on our lives, it is important to understand their evolution.
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| The abacus, which emerged about 5000 years ago in Asia Minor and is fit still in use today may be considered the first computer. This device allows users to make computations using a system of sliding beads arranged on a rack. Early merchants used abacus to make trading transactions. But with the appearance of paper and pencil in Europe the abacus lost its importance.
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| It took nearly 12 centuries for the next significant advance in computing device to emerge. In 1642 Blaise Pascal, the 18-year-old son of a French ticket collector invented a numerical wheel calculator, which used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. In 1694 a German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz improved Pascal’s calculator by creating a machine that could also multiply. In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a French man, invented a machine that could perform 4 basic arithmetic functions. add, subtract, multiply and divide. This arithmometer was widely used until the First World War.
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| The real beginnings of computers lay with an English inventor, mathematics professor Charles Babbage, who designed “an analytical machine” that theoretically could do some of the things a modern computer does. He proposed a machine to perform differential equations. Powered by steam and as a locomotive, the machine would have a stored program and could
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| perform calculations and print the results automatically. However it was never built.
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| A more practical plan came from American inventor Herman Hollerith, who patented a calculating machine in 1889. His machine was used to compute the US census data. Hollerith’s method used perforated (punch) cards to store data which he fed up into machine that compiled the results mechanically. Punch cards were used for many data operations until 1960.
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| The first generation of that can be called a real computer, not just a calculator, was the Colossus, which was used to decipher German codes World War II. It was built only for this task. The 1st general purpose computer is known as ENIAC – Electronic Numeral Integrator and Calculator, designed and built in America by J. Prosper Eckert and John W. Mauchly of the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. But it was enormous, because they used hundreds of vacuum tubes. The invention of a transistor in 1948, which does the same work as the vacuum tube, made today’s computers possible.
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