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The first mechanical calculator was designed and built by the German mathematician Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) in 1623. It was capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. But in 1624 is only working copy was destroyed in a fire. Schickard and his entire family perished in the plague brought on by the 30 years war. His design was not discovered until 1957 when complete description with speeches were found in a letter to Kepler.
Because Schickard’s achievement went unnoticed by historians, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is usually credited with inventing the first calculator. Capable of only addition and subtraction, this device was inferior to Schickard’s calculator. But Pascal was actually successful in marketing his device, and several of them exist to this day.
The great German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) improved upon Pascal's idea, building a calculator in 1673 known as the Leibniz Wheel. It completely automated all four basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Leibniz had one copy of his machine built for Peter the great to send to the Emperor of China.
The first modern computer was designed by the English mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871). He designed two computing devices: the difference engine in 1823 and his analytical engine in 1833. Babbage recognised that there was a need to accurately compute navigation tables upon which British shipping depended. The manually compiled navigation tables were rife with errors. His difference engine was the first attempt at making a machine that could automatically produce accurate navigation tables. Before the difference engine could be completed Babbage abandoned that project and began building the better designed analytical engine. This would be the first truly general purpose programmable computer with its own processor, memory, secondary storage, input device, and output device. The programs would be stored on a belt of a paste cards, the same way that Joseph Marie Jacquard's loom stored programs for patterns to be weaved into fabrics.
The idea of using punched cards was taken up by the American engineer Herman Holerith (1860-1929). In 1890 Holerith invented a machine for processing US census data. Holerith established the tabulating machine company, which later became IBM.
The next major achievement in the history of computing occurred in 1939 at Harvard University when Howard H. Aiken began work on the mark 1 electromechanical computer. This computer was completed in 1944. It was able to perform scientific computations with greater speed and accuracy than had been possible previously. Programs were stored on punched tape.
Near the end of the Second World War ENIAC was built. This was the first fully electronic digital computer. This computer was designed and built by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckhert, Jr. This computer was built for the military. After the war this computer was marketed commercially as the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). The first one was bought by the US census bureau in 1951.
John Von Neumann thought of storing programs in the computer's memory itself. He suggested this idea in 1945 and incorporated into the design of the IAS (Institute for advanced study) computer which became the basis for the design of all modern computers.
Computers in the 1940s used vacuum tubes to store data. In the 1950s magnetic core memory was used. By 1959 transistors were replacing magnetic core memory. In 1965 integrated circuits for invented. Microchips became available in the mid-1970s. The same people could use microcomputers in their home. The Internet was developed during the 1960s. Browser software was invented in 1990 and this was the beginning of worldwide Web.
A new generation of technology appears every three years which makes computing much faster easier and cheaper.
