Young Professional Works on a Personal Computer at His Desk in the Creative Office. Notebook Screen Shows Mobile Phone Application Design, Software UI Development. In Background
What do you think about when you hear the word : COMPUTER ? Do you think that it is an everyday, slim, and easily accessible box which closes and becomes an easily transportable item? If you think so, yes! But if you don’t, you’re probably a 40 year old person to an 80 year old person. But leaving that aside, computers are such a huge part of our life, yet we don’t know what it used to be like and where it came from! So to fulfill that gap in your brain, here is a full essay on The History of Computers for all who don’t know.
The first computer was made by a person named J Presper Eckert Jr. and his friend John Mauchly. ENIAC is the short form of Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. It wasn’t really like our modern computers. Instead it was a humongous supercomputer, but at the time it was revolutionary. Whatever calculations took 12 straight hours to do by hand took just 30 seconds! Yes! And here’s something to set your mind ablaze. ENIAC weighed around 30 tons, and the whole monstrosity had only 20 words of memory! The code had to be inserted manually, but the rest was taken care of by the computer.
The breakthrough was made when Operating Systems were invented. Operating Systems is the full form of OS. Yes, those 2 letters that appear in iOS and macOS. An OS is the essential software that acts as the middleman between the user and computer hardware. It is the single most important part of the computer, and the computer depends on it. Well, The first operating system was GM-NAA I/O, developed by General Motors for their IBM 704 mainframe in 1956. The first operating system to gain huge widespread popularity was… UNIX!
This operating system was created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in 1969. The name stands for UNiplexed Information Computing System. That stands for UNICS, which for marketing reasons became UNIX.
The Internet. Nowadays you think of it as some random thing that hates you and you only and gets revenge by not giving you internet. This is referred to as LAG. But the Internet is actually the only thing that allows software to software communication in a wireless. It was made on January 1, 1983. It was born when the ARPANET and the Defense Data Network transitioned to the TCP/IP standard. After that in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. It rapidly gained popularity and became what it is, out lasting every challenge throughout all these years.
The computers then were very bulky and big. It was very inconvenient to carry around. A lot of brands existed, but probably the most known one is the Apple Macintosh series(e.g.,5500, 6500, 7300, 8600, 9600). These computers had a stylus to write with! Due to the bulkiness, inconvenience, and expensiveness of these cubes, they were not popular. But years will pass and things will change, right? As time went on, more crammed and thinner computers were made. These include Macbooks, Acer laptops, Windows laptops, and many more. Now they were easy to access, transport and thin! Yay! But it wasn’t enough. In 2010, Apple released their best invention yet : the iPad. Tablets emerged and Apple killed it! It was a huge, amazing and great invention. But they weren’t done yet. They announced the … iPhone 1! This was a huge invention as now computers were fitting into our small pockets!
Pretty interesting, right? Many things are very interesting in life, whether it is something common in life or very rare objects. We just have to take a deep dive into it and get interested and it’ll be worth it. I do hope you life this detailed inspection of the history of computers, with a bunch of first ever things to brag to your friends about.
By: Advith Reddy Chintala
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