Computers :: essays research papers

This paper is about the calculator. Today computing machines ar utilise by hundreds of millions of people. There have been many advances in the computer. The computer use to weigh 30 tons and filled warehouse size rooms, further today can be as light as 3 pounds and fit in a persons pocket.There were basically three times the computer was mentioned. One as a mechanical computing device, in about 500 BC The other as a concept in 1833, and the third as the modern day computer in 1946. The frontmost mechanical calculator was called the abacus. The abacus is a is a string of moving beads.The counterbalance concept of the modern computer was graduation outlined in 1833 by the British mathematician Charles Babbage. His outline contained all of todays features in a computer today. Those features are memory, a control unit, and output devices. Even though Babbage worked on the weapon for over 40 years he never actual saying it work. The modern computer grew out of intense researc h efforts mounted during domain War II. The military indispensable faster ballistics calculators, and British cryptographers needed machines to help break the German secret codes.Early as the 1940s the German Inventor, Konrad Zuse, produced the first operational computer. It was apply in aircraft and missile designs, but the German presidency would not let him improve the machine so it never reached its upper limit capability. Two engineers called John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr. from the University of Pennsylvania constructed a calculator. Its construction was an big feat of engineering. The 30-ton machine was 18 feet high and 80 feet long, and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes link by 500 miles of wiring. This calculator performed 100,000 operations per second, and its first operational stress included calculations that helped determine the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb. Computers were finally made to a smaller size in 1958 by Jack Kilby. He used less expensive sili con chips, this made it possible to cram as many as 10 million components on 1 chip. other big step in the computer chip was made by American Engineer Marcian E. Hoff. He combined the uses of a computer into 1 tiny silicon chip which he called the microprocessor. This microprocessor was called the Intel 4004. By the mid 1970s the microprocessor or microchip reduced the cost of computers. The first affordable desktop computer designed specifically for personal use was called the Altair 8800 and was sold by small Instrumentation Telemetry Systems in 1974.