History Of Computers :: essays research papers fc

History of ComputersENG 121     The volume and habit of computers in the world are so great, they havebecome difficult to ignore anymore. Computers surface to us in so many ways thatmany times, we fail to see them as they actually are. People associated with acomputer when they purchased their morning coffee tree at the vending machine. Asthey drove themselves to work, the traffic lights that so often hampered us arecontrolled by computers in an attempt to speed the journey. Accept it or not,the computer has invaded our life.     The origins and roots of computers started out as many other inventionsand technologies have in the past. They evolved from a relatively simple idea orplan knowing to help perform functions easier and quicker. The head start basic typeof computers were designed to do just that compute. They performed basic mathfunctions such as multiplication and variance and displayed the results in avariety of methods. Some co mputers displayed results in a binary representationof electronic lamps. Binary denotes using only ones and zeros thus, lit lampsrepresented ones and unilluminated lamps represented zeros. The irony of this is thatpeople needed to perform another mathematical function to translate binary todecimal to make it readable to the user.     One of the first computers was called ENIAC. It was a huge, monstroussize nearly that of a standard railroad car. It contained electronic tubes,heavy gauge wiring, angle-iron, and knife switches just to name a fewer of thecomponents. It has become difficult to believe that computers have evolved intosuitcase sized micro-computers of the 1990s.     Computers eventually evolved into less archaic looking devices near theend of the 1960s. Their size had been reduced to that of a small automobile andthey were processing segments of information at faster rates than older models.Most computers at this time were termed "mainframes" due to the fact that manycomputers were colligate together to perform a given function. The primary user ofthese types of computers were military agencies and large corporations such asBell, AT&T, General Electric, and Boeing. Organizations such as these had thefunds to afford such technologies. However, operation of these computersrequired extensive intelligence and manpower resources. The average person couldnot have fathomed trying to operate and use these million dollar processors.     The United States was attributed the title of pioneering the computer.It was not until the early 1970s that nations such as Japan and the UnitedKingdom started utilizing technology of their own for the development of thecomputer. This resulted in newer components and smaller sized computers.