The first electrical computers and WW2Īs we all know, necessity is the mother of invention and never was that more true that during WW2! During this period, electromechanical computer technology speed rocketed.Įarly electromechanical computers were a sort of hybrid between modern electrical computers and analog computers. Over a 10 year period, he received a staggering £17,000 (over £2,000,000 in 2020) from the British government, unfortunately, they eventually lost faith in his idea and cut the funding. He saw mechanical computers as a way to remove error.
In Babbage’s time calculations were typically done by human computers and were frequently full of error. Punch cards were used as input, based on the Jacquard Loom punch card system, invented at the turn of the 19th century. The Analytical Engine, a later Babbage computer design, would have had a whopping 675 bytes of memory! He named the CPU = The Mill” and the memory “the store”. Amazingly, it worked! It took 6 years to build, weighs 4535.92kg (five short tons), measures 2.1 m, 3.4m, 0.5m (6’11” x 11’2” x 1’8”) and has 8,000 parts.Ĭharles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. Finally, In 1991, the British Science museum constructed the design from Babbage’s original plans. If completed it would have had some 25,000 parts, weighed 13,600 kg (15 short tons) and been 2.4 m (8 ft) tall.īetween 1847–1849 Babbage created drawings for the Difference Engine No. In 1822 Babbage started working on a Difference Engine its purpose was to compute polynomial functions.
From 1822 until his death in 1871, he designed 3 computers, but never actually constructed any of them, due to lack of funding. Who invented computers? Charles BabbageĬharles Babbage, an English polymath, is often thought of as “the man who invented computers”. Generally, these fulfilled a single purpose. In the centuries that followed, numerous clockwork “calculation machines” were created. Due to its complexity, many speculate that it had several, less complex predecessors. The Antikythera mechanism was a 34 cm × 18 cm × 9 cm (13.4 in × 7.1 in × 3.5 in) inscription covered, wooden box, with at least 30 gears. A reconstruction of the Antikythera – the world’s first “computer”. Archeologists believe it was used to calculate eclipses and other astronomical events. It is an ancient-Geek, hand-powered mechanical device. The first computer, that we know about, is the Antikythera mechanism (200 BC – 70 BC).
The first time the word “computer” was used to describe a machine was 1897. “Computers” were people who performed complex calculations, essentially they were mathematicians and bookkeepers. Early computers were actually people, not machines – it was a job title.
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