The Fin Forum

Have you ever been asked by young kids, or wondered yourself, who invented the computer? When the first names that come to mind are IBM, Steve Jobs, Al Gore, or Bill Gates, you’re thinking across the wrong lines. Computers developed from calculating machines. One of the earliest mechanical devices for calculating, still widely used today, may be the abacus – a frame carrying parallel rods on which beads or counters are strung. The abacus originated from Egypt in 2000 b.c.e.; it reached the Orient about a thousand years later, and arrived in Europe in about the year 300 c.e.

If we return over time much farther, it would probably be entirely possible that the person who invented the computer would be a Cro-Magnon man residing in what’s now Czechoslovakia 20,000 years ago. The sole evidence we will need to support this is a wolf bone which was unearthed recently. It had 35 scratches from it and so they were grouped in fives. Someone was having an artificial solution to create a mathematical computation. In 1617, John Napier (1550-1617) invented “Napier’s Bones”-marked bits of ivory for multiples of numbers. Down the middle of a similar century, Blaise Pascal (1623- 1662) produced a fairly easy mechanism for adding and subtracting. Multiplication by repeated addition would have been a feature of a stepped drum or wheel machine of 1694 introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).

To arrive today’s era of artificial intelligence, natural language processing and high power processing, computer inventions had to endure various generations. English mathematician Charles Babbage (1792-1871) is named the first to conceptualize the computer. He worked to develop a mechanical computing machine called the “analytical engine,” which is the prototype of the digital computer. While attending Cambridge University in 1812, Babbage conceived of the thinking behind a device that could calculate data faster than could humans – and without human error. These were early years of the Industrial Revolution, as well as the world Babbage lived in was growing increasingly complex. Human errors in mathematical tables posed serious problems for a lot of burgeoning industries. After graduating from Cambridge, Babbage returned to the idea of a computational aid. He spent the remainder of his life and much of his fortune trying to build this kind of machine, but he was not to finish. Nevertheless, Babbage’s never-completed “analytical engine” (on which he began be employed in 1834) was the forerunner of the modern digital computer, a programmable electronic device that stores, retrieves, and processes data. Babbage’s device used punch cards to store data and was meant to print answers.

And this all started with Charles Babbage’s difference engine in 1822. The difference engines and analytical engines (if completed) could be heavily mechanical. Their weight would be in tons (although analytical and difference engine are not regarded as of any generation, let’s consider them to be the zeroth generation with regard to reference). The primary feature of first generation (1940 – 1956) computers was vacuum tubes. The architecture of second generation (1956 – 1963) computers was based on transistors. Third generation computers (1964 – 1971) saw the roll-out of integrated circuits. And fourth generation (1971 – present) computers provide microprocessors. And today we’re in the fifth generation (present – henceforth) of computers, where artificial intelligence takes precedence.

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The drawbacks are that All-in-one PCs are not as easy to expand, and USB ports and CD/DVD drives tend to not be as accessible when they are on the front of your mini-tower. All-in-one designs can also be higher priced, especially if you want a big screen, so you can’t replace the computer separately from replacing the screen.