Historical perspective

As people learn new things, they use that knowledge to generate more new information. The more information they have, the more they try to find better ways to store it, process it, and retrieve it. During the past forty years, a giant leap has been made in dealing with information. Men and women have developed high-speed computers which accept, store, process, and give out information. The computers work faster than people like Pascal or Hollerith ever dreamed possible.

The age of "modern computers" began in 1944. That year an American engineer at Harvard University, Howard Aiken,built a computer. It worked very much like a machine designed more than 100 years earlier – Babbage's Analytical Engine. Aiken's computer, called the Mark I, accepted information through punched cards. It stored and processed the information. It printed the results on an electric typewriter. The Mark I was able to do many different tasks. It was a huge machine. It took up the space of a school gymnasium. It took only a few seconds to calculate a math problem – quite a feat for 1944! The Mark I is known today as the world's first electro-mechanical computer.

Soon after the invention of the Mark I, scientists began to build computers that had almost no moving parts. That is, they were electronic rather than mechanical. Most of the computers that you'll be reading about are called digital computers.A digital computer changes information into digits to be stored and processed. Electronic digital computers quickly replaced the Mark I. In fact, a few years after the Mark I was built, electromechanical computers became old-fashioned, and weren't used any more.

There have been several major changes in digital computers during the past forty years. Each change ushered in a new "generation" of computers. Just as we have different generations of people in a family, computers have generations, too.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20