A Brief History of Computers
Dec 23, 2015
1645 A.D.A mechanical adding and
subtractingmachine called the Pascaline (after
itsinventor, the French mathematicianBlaise Pascal) was invented.
1830Charles Babbage, the father ofcomputers, designed the first
electroniccomputer called the difference
engine.Unfortunately, the difference engine
wasnever actually built, but today’scomputers are based on it.
1890The 1890 census was predicted to
be sovast that people-power alone could
nottabulate it. Therefore, an inventornamed Herman Hollerith invented
thepunch card. Census data was
punchedonto these cards , and tabulatingmachines computed the totals.
1937An electromechanical calculator wasbuilt with the help of IBM. Although
nottruly an electronic computer because
allits parts were mechanical and moving,the Mark I computer (as it was named)proved the theory of computingmachines could be a reality and not justa theory.
1957FORTRAN, one of the oldestprogramming languages still in usetoday, was developed toaid scientific and mathematicalprogrammers.
1976BASIC was ported to the earlymicrocomputers by Microsoft, a
companyformed and run by two teenagers
out oftheir garage, (one of these guys
was BillGates)
1976 - 1978Two of the most importantmicrocomputers that started the
truetrend of home computing, the Applecomputer and Radio Shack’s TRS-
80were invented.
1981The introduction of IBM’s firstmicrocomputer, the IBM PC, finally
addedstability to microcomputers.
1982The American National StandardsInstitute (ANSI) agreed to a
universallyaccepted standard for the Cprogramming language.C would prove to be the most
importantlanguage of the 1980’s.
1989The C++ programming language
wasmade available for a wide variety ofmicrocomputers, helping to
spearheadthe object-oriented programming
(OOP)movement.
1990Visual Basic began taking shape toprovide Windows programming
skillswithout requiring huge investments
intime.