THE HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER AND THE INTERNET WRITTEN BY: DALTON PERIOD 7

Here are some guys that didn’t invent the computer or the internet…but they did have good ideas that led to the making of the computer and the internet Here are some guys that didn’t invent the computer or the internet…but they did have good ideas that led to the making of the computer and the internet Blaise Pascal ( )- invented The Pascaline Gottfried Leibniz ( )- invented Step Reckoner Charles Babbage ( )- invented Babbage’s Analytical Engine Charles Babbage ( )- invented Babbage’s Analytical Engine Howard Aiken ( )- Invented Mark I Howard Aiken ( )- Invented Mark I

JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT BABBAGE… Babbage’s Analytical Machine was supposed to perform a variety of calculations by following a set of instructions, or program, stored on punched cards. It was planned to store information in a memory unit that would allow it to make decisions and then carry out instructions based on these decisions. Unfortunately it was never built, but its design served as a model for the modern computer.

ANOTHER GUY THAT DIDN’T INVENT THE COMPUTER OR THE INTERNET…BUT HE DID HELP ANOTHER GUY THAT DIDN’T INVENT THE COMPUTER OR THE INTERNET…BUT HE DID HELP Herman Hollerith ( ) invented a tabulating machine that used electricity rather than mechanical gears. Holes representing information to be tabulated were punched in cards, with the location of each hole representing a specific piece of information. It was used for the Cencus of The full statistical analysis took only seven years instead of the previous 9 years to tabulate all the information.

AND NOW FOR THE REAL COMPUTER STUFF… The first electronic computer was built between 1939 and 1942 at Iowa State University by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) used the binary number system of 1s and 0s that is still used in computers today. It contained hundreds of vacuum tubes and stored numbers for calculations by electronically burning holes in sheets of paper. The output of calculations was displayed on an odometer type of device.

WHAT IS BINARY? Binary is a numeric system which uses two numerals to represent all real numbers. While the most common counting system, the decimal system, uses ten numerals, binary uses only 0 and 1.Each digit in a binary number system therefore represents a power of two. The first digit on the right represents the 0th power, the second represents the 1st power, the third represents the 2nd power, and so on. So the number 1 in the decimal system is represented also as 1 in the binary system. A bit is a single numeric value, either '1' or '0', that encodes a single unit of digital information. A byte is a sequence of bits; usually eight bits equal one byte.

WHERE DID THE TERM “DEBUG” COME FROM? The term “debug” came from Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper. A program running on the Mark II had to be “debugged” when a moth flew into the computer’s circuitry causing an electrical short. After that…the name stuck and now we use it in the computer industry every day.

THE ENIAC (ELECTRONIC NUMERICAL INTEGRATION AND CALCULATOR) In 1946, John Mauchly and John Eckert developed the ENIAC I at the University of Pennsylvania. The American military sponsored their research; the army needed a computer for calculating artillery-firing tables, the settings used for different weapons under varied conditions for target accuracy. Unfortunately, the war ended before it was used but it wasn’t wasted. It was able to solve a math problem in 20 seconds rather than 3 days by a team of mathematicians.

WHY TRANSISTORS REPLACED VACCUM TUBES The invention of the transistor made computers smaller and less expensive and increased calculating speeds up to 10,000 calculations per second. OLD VACCUM TUBES NEW TRANSISTOR

WHAT IS A PROGRAM ON A COMPUTER? A program is a list of instructions written in a special language that only the computer understands. This is a computer program…its a lot of stuff

THE FIRST MICROCOMPUTER (DESKTOP) In 1970, Marcian Hoff, an engineer at Intel Corp., invented the microprocessor which was an entire CPU on a single chip. This made it possible to build a computer called a microcomputer that fits on a desktop. The first of these was the Altair built in THE ALTAIR

HOW THE INTERNET CAME ABOUT… The Internet evolved from ARPANET and the theory of open architecture networking. ARPANET was created in the late 1960s by the Department of Defense’s ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency). It initially connected computers at the University of California Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute.

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