A computer is a machine that can be instructed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical

operations automatically via computer programming. Modern computers have the ability to follow
generalized sets of operations, called programs. These programs enable computers to perform an
extremely wide range of tasks.

Computer time line

Pre-20th century.

The Ishango bone, a bone tool dating back to prehistoric Africa.

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one
correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was probably a form of tally stick.

2400BC

The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from devices
used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BC. Since then, many other forms of reckoning boards or
tables have been invented. In a medieval European counting house, a checkered cloth would be
placed on a table, and markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid to
calculating sums of money.

150-100BC

The Antikythera mechanism, dating back to ancient Greece circa 150 –100 BC, is an early analog
computing device. The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest mechanical analog
"computer", according to Derek J. de Solla Price. It was designed to calculate astronomical
positions. It was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera,
between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to c. 100 BC.
(1532 – ca 1608)

sector, a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, trigonometry,

multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as squares and cube roots, was
developed in the late 16th century and found application in gunnery, surveying and navigation.

1620–1630

The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, shortly after the publication of the concept of the
logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide
rule development progressed, added scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes
and cube roots, as well as transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular
and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions.

1872

The tide-predicting machine invented by Sir William Thomson in was of great utility to navigation
in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide
levels for a set period at a particular location.

In 1876, Lord Kelvin had already discussed the possible construction of such calculators, but he
had been stymied by the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators. In a differential
analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a graphing output.
The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to work. Starting in the 1920s,
Vannevar Bush and others developed mechanical differential analyzers
First computing device
19th century

A portion of Babbage's Difference engine.

Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath, originated the concept of a
programmable computer. Considered the "father of the computer", he conceptualized and invented
the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his revolutionary
difference engine, designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that a much
more general design, an Analytical Engine, was possible. For output, the machine would have a
printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to
be read in later. The Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of
conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-
purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.

1888

His son, Henry Babbage, completed a simplified version of the analytical engine's computing unit
(the mill) in 1888. He gave a successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906.

Analog computers
1879–1881
Sir William Thomson's third tide-predicting machine design, 1879–1881
During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by
increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model
of the problem as a basis for computation. However, these were not programmable and generally
lacked the versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers. The first modern analog
computer was a tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir William Thomson in 1872. The
differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by
integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson, the
brother of the more famous Lord Kelvin.

1927

The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer, built by
H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MIT starting in 1927. By the 1950s, the success of digital
electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but analog
computers remained in use during the 1950s in some specialized applications such as education
(control systems) and aircraft (slide rule.)

Digital computers
Electromechanical
1938
Figure This was the Torpedo Data Computer
This was the Torpedo Data Computer, which used trigonometry to solve the problem of firing a
torpedo at a moving target. During World War II similar devices were developed in other countries
as well. Early digital computers were electromechanical; electric switches drove mechanical relays
to perform the calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually
superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes. The Z2, created
by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939, was one of the earliest examples of an
electromechanical relay computer.

1941

In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3, the world's first working
electromechanical programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was built with 2000
relays, implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5 –10 Hz.
Program code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of memory or
supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some respects, pioneering
numerous advances such as floating point numbers. Rather than the harder-to-implement decimal
system (used in Charles Babbage's earlier design), using a binary system meant that Zuse's
machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at
that time.
Vacuum tubes and digital electronic circuits
Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical
equivalents, at the same time that digital calculation replaced analog. The engineer Tommy
Flowers, in the 1930s, began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange.
Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation five years later, converting a
portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system, using
thousands of vacuum tubes. In the US, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State
University developed and tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942, the first
"automatic electronic digital computer". This design was also all-electronic and used about 300
vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory.

1943

Colossus, the first electronic digital programmable computing device, was used to break German
ciphers during World War II. Max Newman and his colleagues commissioned Flowers to build the
Colossus. He spent eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building the first
Colossus. Colossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable computer. It used a large
number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to
perform a variety of boolean logical operations on its data, but it was not Turing-complete. Nine
Mk II Colossi were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total).
Colossus Mark I contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Mark II with 2,400 valves, was
both 5 times faster and simpler to operate than Mark I, greatly speeding the decoding process.
1945

ENIAC was the first electronic, Turing-complete device, and performed ballistics trajectory
calculations for the United States Army.
The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first electronic
programmable computer built in the U.S. Although the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus, it was
much faster, more flexible, and it was Turing-complete. Like the Colossus, a "program" on the
ENIAC was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored
program electronic machines that came later. Once a program was written, it had to be
mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. The programmers
of the ENIAC were six women, often known collectively as the "ENIAC girls
It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many complex
problems. It could add or subtract 5000 times a second, a thousand times faster than any other
machine. It also had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was limited
to 20 words (about 80 bytes). ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full
operation at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, using 200 kilowatts of
electric power and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands
of resistors, capacitors, and inductors.

Modern computers
1948

A section of the Manchester Baby, the first electronic stored-program computer

Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing its function required the re-wiring and
re-structuring of the machine. With the proposal of the stored-program computer this changed. A
stored-program computer includes by design an instruction set and can store in memory a set of
instructions (a program) that details the computation. The theoretical basis for the stored-program
computer was laid by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical
Laboratory and began work on developing an electronic stored-program digital computer. His
1945 report "Proposed Electronic Calculator" was the first specification for such a device.

The Manchester Baby was the world's first stored-program computer. It was built at the Victoria
University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first
program on 21 June 1948. It was designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first random-
access digital storage device. Although the computer was considered "small and primitive" by the
standards of its time, it was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a
modern electronic computer.

1951

The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first
commercially available general-purpose computer. Built by Ferranti, it was delivered to the
University of Manchester in February 1951.

1951

The LEO I computer became operational in April 1951 and ran the world's first regular routine
office computer job.

Transistors
 Fro
m 1955 onwards, transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the
"second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages:
they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat
*Bipolar junction transistor (BJT)

*The metal–oxide–silicon field-effect transistor (MOSFET), also known as the MOS transistor,

*Modern monolithic ICs are predominantly MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor)

The development of the MOS integrated circuit led to the invention of the microprocessor, and
heralded an explosion in the commercial and personal use of computers.

*System on a Chip (SoCs) are complete computers on a microchip (or chip) the size of a coin.

Mobile computers

2000s

The first mobile computers were heavy and ran from mains power. The 50lb IBM 5100 was an
early example. Later portables such as the Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable were considerably
lighter but still needed to be plugged in. The first laptops, such as the Grid Compass, removed this
requirement by incorporating batteries – and with the continued miniaturization of computing
resources and advancements in portable battery life, portable computers grew in popularity in the
2000s. The same developments allowed manufacturers to integrate computing resources into
cellular mobile phones by the early

These smartphones and tablets run on a variety of operating systems and recently became the
dominant computing device on the market. These are powered by System on a Chip (SoCs), which
are complete computers on a microchip the size of a coin.
Popular Computer nowadays.
Computers are used as control systems for a wide variety of industrial and consumer devices. This
includes simple special purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls, factory
devices such as industrial robots and computer-aided design, and also general purpose devices like
personal computers and mobile devices such as smartphones. The Internet is run on computers and
it connects hundreds of millions of other computers and their users.

Reference:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer