This was followed up by Microsoft’s Windows. They made significant headways into the development of computers.Īpple announced the new personal computers that eventually took over the market in 1976. It made computers user friendly and made them favourable for general use.įollowing this, there was a parabolic rise in the development of computers with Bell Laboratories, IBM and Apple Inc. But the shift of computers beyond the scientific world came in 1964 when Douglas Engelbart showed a computer prototype with a mouse and a Graphical User Interface. In 1953, the first programming language COBOL was developed, and FORTRAN followed it up. This paved the way for integrated circuits which form the processor chip of modern computers. Then came a fundamental design switch to transistors a year later when transistors replaced vacuum tubes.
Two years later, a green light for building UNIVAC came from the US government to make the first computer for commercial and business applications. But the first concrete effort came from two University of Pennsylvania professors who built the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) which filled an entire room and had around 18,000 vacuum tubes. Atanasoff, from the University of Iowa, actually made the first attempt to build a computer. Lady Ada Lovelace, considered to be the world’s first programmer, helped with the programming of the analytical engine.Īround a hundred years later, Alan Turing presented a concept of a universal machine which could theoretically compute anything. This journey of computers began in 1822 with Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, which was used to compute the product of numbers. Computers usually come in different sizes and grades of functionalities. It is a machine that takes in raw data and performs some calculations on it and gives us the formed output in the desired format.Ĭomputer is also a device that stores as well as processes information electronically. The first and most standard definition is that a computer is something which computes or calculates. There are many ways of defining a computer. While you may have seen and used a computer but you may still be unable to answer what is computer correctly. This article is for those parents and their children who want to know what a computer is and what its various components are? But now with your children ready to take the next step into learning computers, you may be beset by various questions that you cannot seem to answer. You may have been using your computer for ages without knowing what its essential components, history, or even computer definition are. To make them future-ready, it is essential to prepare them for this inevitability. As children will be living with this scenario in future, their employment capability will be tested against computers. For those who are not yet familiar with computers, now is the time to gain knowledge about this field. Under such circumstances, a rudimentary knowledge of computers is essential for everyday work. With the growth of artificial intelligence, computers will soon blur lines between man and machine.
Computers are used in many fields like banking, medicine, finance and education with increased preference.