History of the Personal Computer
The first personal computer took up an entire room. ENIAC was 1,800 square feet in size and only did a few basic functions. Modern day PCs have more processing power, which means the user can do multiple tasks at one time. Personal computers have drastically changed since its invention. All in all, personal computers have gotten cheaper, smaller, and can do more than one function.
In the first place, personal computers cost more than the average family income. During the 1900s there was usually only one member of the family that had a paying job. With the head of the family the only one working, the average family income was $827 each year. The average expense for all purposes was $768 and the average expenditure
Which made the price for the PCs themselves to be higher than most family incomes at the time. According to Frank from Columbia University the IBM 610 Auto-Point Computer was invented by John Lentz with the help of Bryon Havens and Robert M. Walker during the 1648-1956 (Lentz). The manufacture price was set at $55,000, or rental at $1150/month, $460 academic. So only 180 units were ever made. With the price to manufacture so high, not many people could afford to buy one. That made the computer industry suffer because people weren’t flocking to the stores to buy these personal computers. Most of the personal computers made at first went to businesses because they were the only ones who could afford to pay the high price for them. ENIAC is generally acknowledged to be the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer and was productively used from 1946 to 1955. ENIAC was built by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania. It was created to calculate ballistic trajectories for the army. This massive behemoth used 18,000 vacuum tubes and took up 1800 square feet of room along with its cooling system. What made the PC so expensive at first was every part had to be put together by hand. There weren’t any machines that could build them at the time. So the PC was priced so high to cover the cost of labor and
ENIAC 's problem with bugs was far more literal than that of today 's computers. Moths were attracted to the warmth and light of the vacuum tubes and would trigger short circuits. From that time, a "computer bug" meant the hardware had a problem, and "debugging" meant fixing it (Enman). The IBM 610 Auto-Point Computer was the first real personal computer developed for the use at home or work. According to one former user, Russ Jensen It consisted of a large cabinet that contains a magnetic drum, the arithmetic control circuitry, a control panel, and separate paper-tape readers and punches for program and data (Lentz). Having to clean the inside of a massive computer was not easy. Any wrong placed piece of metal could ruin the computer. Too much dust collection on certain parts could lead to fires within the computer. Each soldered joint had to be inspected for wear and tear. The IBM 610 Auto-Point Computer didn’t require air conditioning or special power. According to Columbia University, it was designed in the portholed attic of Watson Lab at Columbia University by John Lentz between 1948 and 1954 as the Personal Automatic Computer (Lentz). Cleaning the operator’s keyboard was difficult because it was designed after a typewriter. The complete system weighed 750 pounds, so moving it to clean under it was
...e with two bedrooms a kitchen, and a living room would cost about 675,000 dollars minimum now. In the 1920s it would cost a person 6000 thousand dollars. That is a big difference. But, the people didn’t have a job to get the money. They need to ask for help but no one did. So they had to start conserving their needs and stop buying their useless toys, cars, dolls, and expensive clothing.
In the fifties, computers were in the experimental stage they were extremely hard to work with, and were a constant technicians worst nightmare, because often enough you had to replace the fuses (s Appendix a).
Herman Hollerith (1860 - 1929) founded IBM ( as the Tabulating Machine Company ) in 1896. The company renames known as IBM in 1924. In 1906 Lee D. Forest in America developed the electronic tube (an electronic value). Before this it would have been impossible to make digital electronic computers. In 1919 W. H. Eccles and F. W. Jordan published the first flip-flop circuit design.
When World War II broke out in 1939 the United States was severely technologically disabled. There existed almost nothing in the way of mathematical innovations that had been integrated into military use. Therefore, the government placed great emphasis on the development of electronic technology that could be used in battle. Although it began as a simple computer that would aid the army in computing firing tables for artillery, what eventually was the result was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). Before the ENIAC it took over 20 hours for a skilled mathematician to complete a single computation for a firing situation. When the ENIAC was completed and unveiled to the public on Valentine’s Day in 1946 it could complete such a complex problem in 30 seconds. The ENIAC was used quite often by the military but never contributed any spectacular or necessary data. The main significance of the ENIAC was that it was an incredible achievement in the field of computer science and can be considered the first digital and per...
The PC industry has started to develop fast in the 80's when IBM launched its first PC series and later on when numerous small companies entered the market. PC is a new product and companies had to create the demand to it from the scratch.
to replace the IBM machine. In the 1960s and the 1970s IBM came out quickly and built a
There are many different beginnings to the origins of computers. Their origins could be dated back more than two thousand years ago, depending on what a person means when they ask where the first computer came from. Most primitive computers were created for the purpose of running simple programs at best. (Daves Old Computers) However, the first ‘digital’ computer was created for the purposes of binary arithmetic, otherwise known as simple math. It was also created for regenerative memory, parallel processing, and separation of memory and computing functions. Built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry during 1937-1942, it was dubbed the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC).
Another example of the change in our technology over the last century is the change in the computer. In 1946, the first electronic computer called the ENIAC took up the space of a large room. Instead of using transistors and IC chips, the ENIAC used vacuum tubes. Compared to many computers now, the ENIAC is about as powerful as a small calculator. That may not be much, but it is a milestone because there would not be computers today if it were not for the ENIAC. As the years passed, the computer became smaller and more powerful. Today, more than half of the American population has a computer in their home. The personal computers today are thousands of times more powerful than the most powerful computers fifty years ago.
Prior to the revolution in technology that was microprocessors, making a computer was a large task for any manufacturer. Computers used to be built solely on discrete, or individual, transistors soldered together. Microprocessors act as the brain of a computer, doing all mathematics. Depending on how powerful the machine was intended to be, this could take weeks or even months to produce with individual components. This laborious task put the cost of a computer beyond the reach of any regular person. Computers before lithographic technology were massive and were mostly used in lab scenarios (Brain 1).
In 1975, about one month after the Altair’s debut, IBM introduced the 5100 – dubbed the IBM Portable PC. There were few personal computers available around this time, making the powerful 5100 very attractive as a complete portable system (Sysop, n.d.). At almost 60 pounds and a cost of $9,000-$20,000 however, it was attractive to a small audience. It was designed specifically for professional and scientific problem-solvers. Several years later saw the introduction of what most historians refer to as the first truly portable computer, the Osborne 1 (Bellis, 2005). Released in 1981, the Osborne 1 weighed about 24 pounds and sold for $1795. While the unit itself was still rather bulky, it contained a fold-out keyboard, 5 inch monitor, and two floppy disk drives. Its biggest value however, was the $1500 worth of software that came with it. Unlike the IBM 5100, the Osborne 1 optionally ran on battery packs, enabling true portability. Advances in technology saw the decrease in size of portable computers, as well as an increase in computing power.
The First Generation of Computers The first generation of computers, beginning around the end of World War 2, and continuing until around the year 1957, included computers that used vacuum tubes, drum memories, and programming in machine code. Computers at that time where mammoth machines that did not have the power our present day desktop microcomputers. In 1950, the first real-time, interactive computer was completed by a design team at MIT. The "Whirlwind Computer," as it was called, was a revamped U.S. Navy project for developing an aircraft simulator.
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.
One negative effect of computers on family life is less human contact between family members. In my family, all of us have our own computers that are kept in separate rooms. So if I’m checking my mail on my computer, and my sister is in her room on her computer, we are isolated from each other and cannot talk to each other face to face. This results in less face to face human contact between family members. But just having one computer for a family can still cause less face-to-face contact. If one person is using the computer no one else wants to just sit and do nothing while the computer is being used, so they will go to a different room and each person will end up doing their own thing. Causing less family time, and less human contact within the family.
Another big change that computers have made in our everyday lives is that with the internet we can now access information about just about anything, at any time, and we can do this from the comfort of our own home. Credit cards can be used to do on-line shopping at virtually any store. E-mail has changed the way that people communicate, it is usually free of charge and mail is sent and received in minutes. Devices such as video phones and web-cams make video conferencing possible. This allows people to see who they are talking to in “real-time” even if they are on opposite ends of the map.
There is a need for more computers in everyday life, in homes, schools and on the job. The advancement of computer technology today in all facets of the world, and life are growing to the point that everyone will need a computer to carry out their everyday life. Computer technology today is at the threshold of making life easier for everyone in the world.