The first computers were people!

That is, electronic computers (and the earlier

mechanical computers) were given this name because they performed the work
that had previously been assigned to people. "Computer" was originally a job
title: it was used to describe those human beings (predominantly women)
whose job it was to perform the repetitive calculations required to compute
such things as navigational tables, tide charts etc. Frequent human errors led
inventors to search a way to mechanize this task.

ABACUS

The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is
that it aids the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled
abacus operator can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of
a person equipped with a hand calculator (multiplication and division are
slower). The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest
surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. The abacus is still
in use today, principally in the far east. A modern abacus consists of rings that
slide over rods, but the older one is dates from the time when pebbles were
used for counting (the word "calculus" comes from the Latin word for pebble).

A more modern abacus.

Logarithms

In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier

invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be
performed via addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand,
which was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an
alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks
which are now called Napier's Bones.
SLIDE RULE

Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632
and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini,
and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

A slide rule

PASCALINE

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his
father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven onefunction calculator (it could only add).
STEPPED RECKONER

Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (coinventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function
(addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that
he called the stepped reckoner because, instead of gears, it
employed fluted drums.
PUNCHED CARDS

In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that
could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern
automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by
rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since

Jacquard's Loom showing the threads and the punched cards

A close-up of a Jacquard card

DIFFERENCE ENGINE and ANALYTIC ENGINE

By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam

driven calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference
Engine. This machine would be able to compute tables of numbers, such as
logarithm tables.

After few years he proposed another calculating machine called the Analytic
Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines, would
be more general purpose in nature because it would be programmable, thanks
to the punched card technology of Jacquard. But it was Babbage who made an
important intellectual leap regarding the punched cards. Furthermore, Babbage
realized that punched paper could be employed as a storage mechanism,
holding computed numbers for future reference. Because of the connection to
the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two main parts of his Analytic Engine
the "Store" and the "Mill", as both terms are used in the weaving industry. The
Store was where numbers were held and the Mill was where they were "woven"
into new results. In a modern computer these same parts are called the memory
unit and the central processing unit (CPU).
The Analytic Engine also had a key function that distinguishes computers from
calculators: the conditional statement. A conditional statement allows a
program to achieve different results each time it is run. Based on the
conditional statement, the path of the program (that is, what statements are
executed next) can be determined based upon a condition or situation that is
detected at the very moment the program is running.
HOLLERITH DESK

Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader

which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could
count, and a large wall of dial indicators to display the results of the count.
Hollerith had the insight to convert punched cards to what is today called
a read/write technology. He realized how useful it would be to punch (write)
new cards based upon an analysis (reading) of some other set of cards.
Complicated analyses, too involved to be accomplished during a single pass
thru the cards, could be accomplished via multiple passes thru the cards using
newly printed cards to remember the intermediate results. Unknown to
Hollerith, Babbage had proposed this long before.

Hollerith's technique was successful and the 1890 census was completed in
only 3 years at a savings of 5 million dollars. He built a company, the
Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually became
International Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew rapidly and
punched cards became ubiquitous.

Two types of computer punch cards

MARK I COMPUTER
One early success was the Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a
partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944. This was the first programmable
digital computer made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic computer.
Instead the Mark I was constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and
clutches. The machine weighed 5 tons, incorporated 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet
tall and 51 feet long, and had a 50 ft rotating shaft running its length, turned by a 5
horsepower electric motor. The Mark I ran non-stop for 15 years.

MODERNIZATION OF COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

The advent of microelectronic circuits changed crafted wires into integrated
circuit which is a small sliver of silicon the size of your thumbnail .

The IBM Stretch computer of 1959 needed its 33 foot length to hold the
150,000 transistors it contained. These transistors were tremendously smaller
than the vacuum tubes they replaced, but they were still individual elements
requiring individual assembly. By the early 1980s this many transistors could
be simultaneously fabricated on an integrated circuit. Today's Pentium
4 microprocessor contains 42,000,000 transistors in this same thumbnail sized
piece of silicon.
It's humorous to remember that in between the Stretch machine (which would
be called a mainframe today) and the Apple I (a desktop computer) there was
an entire industry segment referred to as mini-computers such as the following
PDP-12 computer of 1969:
ENIAC
The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually
awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943
and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than
18,000 vacuum tubes.

One of the most obvious problems was that the design would require 18,000
vacuum tubes to all work simultaneously. Even with 18,000 vacuum tubes,
ENIAC could only hold 20 numbers at a time. Eckert and Mauchly's next
teamed up with the mathematician John von Neumann to design EDVAC,
which pioneered the stored program. Because he was the first to publish a

description of this new computer, von Neumann is often wrongly credited with
the realization that the program (that is, the sequence of computation steps)
could be represented electronically just as the data was. But this major
breakthrough can be found in Eckert's notes long before he ever started
working with von Neumann. Eckert was no slouch: while in high school Eckert
had scored the second highest math SAT score in the entire country.

The IBM Personal Computer (PC)

The invention of microprocessor is the major breakthrough for the
development of modern Personal Computer. A microprocessor is a computer
that is fabricated on an integrated circuit (IC). Computers had been around for
20 years before the first microprocessor was developed at Intel in 1971. The
micro in the name microprocessor refers to the physical size. Intel didn't invent
the electronic computer. But they were the first to succeed in cramming an
entire computer on a single chip (IC). Intel was started in 1968 and initially
produced only semiconductor memory (Intel invented both the DRAM and the
EPROM, two memory technologies that are still going strong today). In 1969
they were approached by Busicom, a Japanese manufacturer of high
performance calculators (these were typewriter sized units, the first shirt-pocket
sized scientific calculator was the Hewlett-Packard HP35 introduced in 1972).
Busicom wanted Intel to produce 12 custom calculator chips: one chip
dedicated to the keyboard, another chip dedicated to the display, another for the
printer, etc. But integrated circuits were (and are) expensive to design and this
approach would have required Busicom to bear the full expense of developing
12 new chips since these 12 chips would only be of use to them.

The general purpose computer is adapted to each new purpose by writing

a program which is a sequence of instructions stored in memory (which
happened to be Intel's forte). Intel 4004, the first microprocessor (uP) consisted
of 2300 transistors and was clocked at 108 kHz (i.e., 108,000 times per
second). Compare this to the 42 million transistors and the 2 GHz clock rate
(i.e., 2,000,000,000 times per second) used in a Pentium 4.

Intel followed the 4004 with the 8008 and 8080. Intel priced the 8080
microprocessor at $360 dollars as an insult to IBM's famous 360 mainframe
which cost millions of dollars. The 8080 was employed in the MITS
Altair computer, which was the world's first personal computer (PC).
A Harvard freshman by the name of Bill Gates decided to drop out of college
so he could concentrate all his time writing programs for this computer. This
early experienced put Bill Gates in the right place at the right time once IBM
decided to standardize on the Intel microprocessors for their line of PCs in
1981. The Intel Pentium 4 used in today's PCs is still compatible with the Intel
8088 used in IBM's first PC.