Who invented computers

Babbage never got the chance to build his invention in his lifetime - but it gave the first sense of a digital programmable machine, despite being mechanical. Babbage may have been inspired in his creation by older machines such as the abacus, invented in China in the year Other possible computer predecessors may have included Napier's Bones, invented in by Scottish mathematician John Napier.

Napier's invention was more of a mechanical calculator, which worked by lining up wooden rods with multiplication tables etched into them, in order to easily multiply large numbers. And 25 years later, in , French mathematician Blaise Pascal produced a calculator - but it could only add and subtract.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science declared it a mechanical marvel, but refused to give money to finish building it, in The first computer to be built was Colossus - an electronic, digital machine, made by British code breakers, between and Alan Turing set out the idea for the first modern computer, the Electromechanical Turing machine, in a paper in It depends.

The question remains today as open as this one: What makes a machine a computer? Click Enter. Login Profile. Es En. Economy Humanities Science Technology.

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Ventana al Conocimiento Knowledge Window. Estimated reading time Time 6 to read. Charles Babbage and the mechanical computer Before Babbage, computers were humans. Credit: Science Museum Far from being discouraged by this setback, mathematician, philosopher, engineer and inventor Charles Babbage doubled down.

The Thomson brothers and analogue computers In , one year after Charles Babbage died, the great physicist William Thomson Lord Kelvin invented a machine capable of performing complex calculations and predicting the tides in a given place.

Credit: Science Museum However, it took several more decades until, well into the 20th century, H. Turing and the universal computing machine By this point, these analogue machines could already replace human computers in some tasks and were calculating faster and faster, especially when their gears began to be replaced by electronic components.

Zuse and the digital computer Although Turing established what a computer should look like in theory, he was not the first to put it into practice. Credit: Deutsches Museum The first computer that was Turing-complete, and that had those four basic features of our current computers was the ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer , secretly developed by the US army and first put to work at the University of Pennsylvania on 10 December in order to study the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.

Part 1. Around the same time, the Manchester Mark 1 was another computer that could run stored programs. Built at the Victoria University of Manchester, the first version of the Mark 1 computer became operational in April Mark 1 was used to run a program to search for Mersenne primes for nine hours without error on June 16 and 17 that same year.

The first computer company was Electronic Controls Company and was founded in by J. In , Konrad Zuse began working on the Z4 that later became the first commercial computer.

On April 7, , IBM publicly introduced the , its first commercial scientific computer. MIT introduces the Whirlwind machine on March 8, , a revolutionary computer that was the first digital computer with magnetic core RAM and real-time graphics. The TX-0 Transistorized Experimental computer is the first transistorized computer to be demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in In , the first desktop computer, the Programma , was unveiled to the public at the New York World's Fair.

It was invented by Pier Giorgio Perotto and manufactured by Olivetti. In , Hewlett Packard began marketing the HP A , considered to be the first mass-marketed desktop computer. Although it was never sold, the first workstation is considered to be the Xerox Alto , introduced in The computer was revolutionary for its time and included a fully functional computer, display, and mouse. The computer operated like many computers today utilizing windows , menus , and icons as an interface to its operating system.

Intel introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel , on November 15, Considered as the first microcomputer, it used the Intel processor and was the first commercial non-assembly computer. In , Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights.

The IBM is the first portable computer, which was released in September The computer weighed pounds and had a five-inch CRT display, tape drive , 1. The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I , which was released in April and developed by Adam Osborne.

The Osborne I weighed The computer kit was developed by Steve Wozniak in and contained a 8-bit processor and 4 kb of memory, which was expandable to 8 or 48 kb using expansion cards. Although the Apple I had a fully assembled circuit board, the kit required a power supply , display , keyboard , and case to be operational.

Below is a picture of an Apple I from an advertisement by Apple. The computer was code-named Acorn. When was the first computer invented? Note Early inventions that lead up to the computer, such as the abacus , astrolabe, slide rule , clocks, calculator , and tablet machines, are not accounted for on this page.

When was the word "computer" first used? First mechanical computer or automatic computing engine concept. First general-purpose computer. The first machine to record and store information.