Computers (general History) Essay, Research Paper

In this report, you?ll about the components and history regarding the computer. A computer is a devise that processes, organize, and calculate, displays information. It can communicate with other computers all over the world. The most powerful computer can perform 10s of billion of calculations per second. People use computers for business, track inventories, and use bar codes, personal home use and other things. Computers can produce information, numbers, images, sounds and movies. Embedded computers control devices such as remote controls.

Lets talk about the essential parts of the computer. First you have your outside units like your printer, monitors, modem, floppy disk drive, CD ROM drive, scanner, speakers and keyboard. These things are called peripherals. Printers come in inkjet, laser and thermal. Lasers are much faster than inkjets. The monitor is the television like unit where you observe text and images. Modems permit us to connect to the Internet, which is a global communication network. Modems come in many different speeds. Some are 14.4k, 56k these uses a phone line, cable modem (in only large cities, an internet setup that uses a cable line) and many more. Floppy disk drives are drives where you insert a disk to save progress or install programs from .CD ROMs are compact disk that can read only memory. Scanners are flatbed devises that you can look at pictures at more closely. Speakers allow us to here the sounds coming from the computer. The keyboard is an input unit that produces data bits.

Inside the computer you have processors (CPU), Ram, semiconductor, hard disk, the bus and the operating system. Central Processing Units (CPU) a microprocessor that is, a single piece of silicon containing millions of electrical components. It?s input device or memory is communicated through the bus to the CPU, which is the part of the computer that translates commands and runs programs. Ram is the physical memory of a computer. You can use it to run programs that require memory to load. The semiconductor is the silicone object used for computer inner circuit components. The Bus it the flat cable of numerous wires that joins in with components in the computer. For Example: connection to the CPU to the hard disk. The hard disk is where the machine stores data and programs. When a computer is turned on it searches it memory it is called the operating system. Windows 98 and Mac are forms of operating system.

The abacus was probably the first computer and it was the birth of it. It was a wooden rack with parallel wires on which beads are strung. All ordinary math operation could be done on it. Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical computer in 1642 at the 19. It was a calculator that you fed numbers by turning dials. Pascal built 50 copies of his machine. Only the wealthy owned them. A German man, Gottfried Leibniz added a gearing system to enable multiplication on Pascal?s computer. Charles Babbage of Great Britain invented the first desktop calculator. It used the same principles of the modern day computer. He worked on it for 10 years, it. The desktop computer was very elaborate but it wasn?t complete because of the techniques were ahead of his time also no one at the time needed it. He pursued other ideas.

In 1890 Herman Hollerith and James Powers for the census developed a devise that could read information on cards without anyone intermediation. When Holleroth and Powers made the creation, commercial interest impacted it so computer companies such as IBM (International Business Machines) was interested.

During the outbreak of WWII, it produced a need for computers in 1942. ENIAC was produced and was made by John W. Mauchyl. ENIAC stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, the first large-scale, general purpose, digital computer. The computer used 18,000 standard vacuum parts, occupied 167 meters squared of floor space and it used 180,000 watts of electricity. It was used for the US military. ENIAC contained 20 storage registers called accumulators that stored intermediate and final calculations. Each accumulator held a ten-digit number. In 1947 ENIAC was moved from the University of Pennsylvania to its permanent home at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. ENIAC could perform about 5000 calculations per second that?s more than 10,000 times slower than modern personal computers. It took ENIAC about 20 seconds to solve problems and it took one or two days to finish manually. At least it was much faster and easier than previous computer models. In 1971, U.S physicist, John V. Atanasoff was believed to use the vacuum hose concept and brought the designers of ENIAC to court. The issue was about the patenability. Atansoff was in favor.

In the 50s most large companies stored data on magnetic tape because they were inexpensive and limitless, but they were slow. RAM in the 50s increased from 8,000-word capacity to 8 times of that. In the 60s, computers were very expensive, only industries and private computers had them. Many companies such as Radio Shack and Apple were developing successful computers during the 70s. They were trying to make the computer more affordable.

Computers are getting doubled the speed about every 18 months. They are getting cheaper because of the rise in competition. The advances of technology enable us to excel in our technical needs. It was studies that children who uses computers, are more likely to do better in school. The computer is defiantly one of man?s best creations.