he cliche "Necessity is the mother of invention" seems particularly apt for discussing the development of the computer, whose history begins in the nineteenth century. During that century, as this book tells us, the Industrial Revolution caused population and urbanization to increase. This required that business and government greatly expand and search for better ways to collect and process information. Enter Charles Babbage (person) Charles Babbage - The british inventor known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical Engine. , an Englishman credited with inventing the world's first mechanical computer that could calculate and print. On this side of the Atlantic, Herman Hollerith (person) Herman Hollerith - The promulgator of the punched card. Hollerith was born on 1860-02-29 and died on 1929-11-17. He graduated from Columbia University, NewYork, NY, USA.
..... Click the link for more information., seeing a business opportunity in a machine that could mechanically tabulate (1) To arrange data into a columnar format.
(2) To sum and print totals.
..... Click the link for more information. the U.S. census of 1890, created a punch-card tabulator A punch card accounting machine that calculates totals and prints the results. Since the late 1800s, tabulators were used to accumulate totals and were later capable of printing. Countless invoices, checks and green-striped reports were printed on tabulating machines all the way up into
..... Click the link for more information. that eventually became the technology that created IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) .
n the twentieth century Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, so successfully applied his marketing and sales abilities that in 1924 he stated, "Everywhere ... there will be IBM machines in use. The sun never sets on IBM." World War II military needs sped up computer development resulting in the ENIAC ENIAC
in full Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
Early electronic digital computer built in the U.S. in 1945 by J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly.
..... Click the link for more information., the first fully electronic computer which contained 20,000 electronic tubes and filled a 30 by 50 foot room. The modem personal computer liberated users from dependence on room-sized mainframe computers like ENIAC and its successors.
Today we see computer companies competing over how to best maximize storage ability, processing speed, and reliability at an affordable price. No matter how successful the companies are, obsolescence ob·so·les·cent
adj.
1. Being in the process of passing out of use or usefulness; becoming obsolete.
2. Biology Gradually disappearing; imperfectly or only slightly developed. seems built into the process (the authors tell us they used three generations of personal computers during the five years it took them to write this book).
Computer includes a 13 page bibliography, 16 pages of illustrations and a brief discussion of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The authors do not discuss computer science and computer theory, nor do they treat artificial intelligence. But there's enough material provided here to temporarily satisfy the interest of anyone curious about the history of an invention that's ever changing, and ever changing us.
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