The History Of Computer Technology

Early computing traces back its history to early civilizations, beginning with the Babylonians. From earlier times, human beings have device ways to help them perform basic calculations, which means the idea of computing is not a new concept. However, computers before World War II were very limited in what they could do, in fact many of the devices involved just basic calculations. It wasn’t until after World War II broke out, that researchers saw the need to expand their ideas, in order to contribute to war efforts. Competition for building bigger, better machines was at its highest as the revolution of the computer begun in the 1930’s. From this computer revolution, several machines or computers were developed that served as prototypes into …show more content…
Before 1936, the concept of computers involved a person doing manual calculations. The first computer to be built for the use of World War II was the Colossus, which was used by Britain for cryptanalysis and decryption of German wireless communication. (Wells, pg.1) This marked the beginning for computers to play a highly important role during war. After the Colossus, the ENIAC, EDVAC, and IAS followed in the United States, which helped unfold new ideas for future generation of computers. Their contribution to war efforts made a huge impact in the way computers were viewed as performing other general tasks. These computers were considered first and second generators, in that they contained vacuum tubes, and transistors …show more content…
They are known as the first three programmable digital electronic computers. (Burks, pg.1) Soon after, John W. Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert created the Electronic Numerical Integrator Computer (ENIAC) from 1943-1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineer. (Burks, pg.4) The ENIAC became the first programmable computer, as well as the first general-purpose electronic computer. (Burks, pg.13) Its design came from the analog mechanical computer (DA), which had been previously used by Atanasoff in the ABC. The ENIAC was built shortly after the United States entered War World II; it was designed to be used for ballistic analysis and to calculate the trajectory of naval shells during the war. However, it was not completed on time to be used during the war, in fact it wasn’t available until 1946. In 1945 it was used by Edward Teller to compute a conjecture for the hydrogen bomb he was designing. Despite not being functional for War World II it led to first commercial computer to be available to a select group of business