The German civil engineer Konrad Zuse is considered the inventor of the first digital and programmable computers — a feat he first accomplished in , long before anyone else, anywhere in the world. Engineer and inventor Konrad Zuse. Zuse was born in Deutsch-Wilmersdorf, now part of Berlin, on June 22, Two years later, his family moved to Braunsberg in eastern Prussia, where his father Emil worked as a postal clerk. Later Konrad attended high school in Hoyerswerda. After graduating, he studied at the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg , where he obtained a degree in civil engineering in The artistic engineer also designed advertisements for Ford during his university years.
Bored by having to do routine calculations, at the age of 28, Zuse pron. Kilburn's program was executed on June 21, It was also the first computer to run a graphical computer game, "OXO," an implementation of tic-tac-toe displayed on a 6-inch cathode ray tube. Around the same time, the Manchester Mark 1 was another computer that could run stored programs. Built at the Victoria University of Manchester, the first version of the Mark 1 computer became operational in April Mark 1 was used to run a program to search for Mersenne primes for nine hours without error on June 16 and 17 that same year.
The first computer company was Electronic Controls Company and was founded in by J. In , Konrad Zuse began working on the Z4 that later became the first commercial computer. On April 7, , IBM publicly introduced the , its first commercial scientific computer.
MIT introduces the Whirlwind machine on March 8, , a revolutionary computer that was the first digital computer with magnetic core RAM and real-time graphics. The TX-0 Transistorized Experimental computer is the first transistorized computer to be demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in In , the first desktop computer, the Programma , was unveiled to the public at the New York World's Fair.
It was invented by Pier Giorgio Perotto and manufactured by Olivetti. In , Hewlett Packard began marketing the HP A , considered to be the first mass-marketed desktop computer. Although it was never sold, the first workstation is considered to be the Xerox Alto , introduced in The computer was revolutionary for its time and included a fully functional computer, display, and mouse. The computer operated like many computers today utilizing windows , menus , and icons as an interface to its operating system.
Intel introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel , on November 15, Considered as the first microcomputer, it used the Intel processor and was the first commercial non-assembly computer. In , Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights.
The IBM is the first portable computer, which was released in September The computer weighed pounds and had a five-inch CRT display, tape drive , 1. The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I , which was released in April and developed by Adam Osborne.
The Osborne I weighed Estimated reading time Time 6 to read. Charles Babbage and the mechanical computer Before Babbage, computers were humans. Credit: Science Museum Far from being discouraged by this setback, mathematician, philosopher, engineer and inventor Charles Babbage doubled down.
The Thomson brothers and analogue computers In , one year after Charles Babbage died, the great physicist William Thomson Lord Kelvin invented a machine capable of performing complex calculations and predicting the tides in a given place. Credit: Science Museum However, it took several more decades until, well into the 20th century, H. Turing and the universal computing machine By this point, these analogue machines could already replace human computers in some tasks and were calculating faster and faster, especially when their gears began to be replaced by electronic components.
Zuse and the digital computer Although Turing established what a computer should look like in theory, he was not the first to put it into practice. Credit: Deutsches Museum The first computer that was Turing-complete, and that had those four basic features of our current computers was the ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer , secretly developed by the US army and first put to work at the University of Pennsylvania on 10 December in order to study the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.
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Thank you for collaborating with the OpenMind community! Your comment will be published after validation. Please, try again later. Next article. Zoonoses: Animals and Major Pandemics in History. Newsletter Keep up to date with our newsletter. In , Peter's renowned atlas of world history already listed Zuse among the century's 30 most important figures, along with Einstein , Gandhi, Hitler, Lenin, Roosevelt, Mao, Picasso, etc.
A collection of Zuse's writings and pictures of his machines can be found in this online archive. Correspondence by J. Plus comment on response by Hodges. Nature vol , p , 29 March Nature p 25, May
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