Computers

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Computers

The Computer that you know these days is a small thing that sits on a desk in your room that is composed of a monitor, keyboard, mouse and a small box. But computers have changed so much that if you seen old computer you would never recognize it. The first computer was built in the early 17 hundreds. You probably heard that the first computer was made in the 1950’s but computers have been around for hundreds of years.

All a computer is is something that calculates number. So these computers of the 1700’s were made from gears that worked together to make a answer. “In the nineteenth century, Englishman Charles Babbage designed a steam powered machine that could calculate square roots, cube roots and other exponential functions.” (1) The first computer was an abacus. “The Chinese abacus consists of a wooden frame divided into an upper and lower section.” (2) These are all computer that have been around 100’s of years.

Latter in the 20th century the government started to work on a top-secret project. That was the birth of type of computer. Similar to your computer but still very vary different. You would probably still would have never have guest what it is. The computer had no screen and it was the size of a office building. This computer was programmed differently too instead of typing in to a computer they had to make cards with holes in it that stood for different thing for it to do. They first had to make a program for typing so that they could have a keyboard connected to it. But still that was not good enough they need a program so that they could use the keyboard program on the system. This is called a operating system. The operating system is a lot like windows, it’s what keeps your computer interactive with you. But at that time they didn’t have a operating system and had to create one. One of the first operating systems open to the public was DOS.

The computer for years had been improved to smaller and smaller parts to run it faster and faster. Soon the computer was the size of a house. By then everyone knew about a computer. It was not until 1985 that the computer industry was able to take off and become one of the most important necessities in this world.

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