Who is the father of the computer?

Who is the father of the computer?

Answer

There are hundreds of people who have major contributions to the computer. Below are the primary founding fathers of computing, the computer, and the personal computer we know and use today.

Charles BabbageFather of computing

Charles Babbage is considered to be the father of computing after his invention and concept of the Analytical Engine in 1837. The Analytical Engine contained an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), basic flow control, and integrated memory and is the first general-purpose computer concept. Unfortunately, because of funding issues this computer was never built while Charles Babbage's was alive.

However, in 1910 Henry Babbage, Charles Babbage's youngest son was able to complete a portion of this machine and was able to perform basic calculations. In addition, in 1991, the London Science Museum completed a working version of the Analytical Engine No 2, which incorporated his refinements Babbage discovered during his initial development of the Analytical Engine.

Although Babbage never completed his invention in his life time, his radical ideas and concepts of the computer are what make him the father of computing.

Konrad ZuseFather of the computer

There are several people who could be considered as the father of the computer including Alan Turing, John Atanasoff, and John von Neumann. However, for the purpose of this document we're going to be considering Konrad Zuse as the father of the computer with his development of the Z1, Z2, Z3, and Z4 computers.

In 1936 to 1938 Konrad Zuse created Z1 in his parents living room, this computer consisted of over 30,000 metal parts and is considered to be the first electro-mechanical binary programmable computer. Later in 1939, the German military commissioned Zuse to build the Z2, which was largely based on the Z1. Later, he completed the Z3 in May of 1941, the Z3 was a revolutionary computer for its time and is considered the first electromechanical and program-controlled computer. Finally, on July 12, 1950 Zuse completed and shipped the Z4 computer, which is considered to be the first commercial computer.

Ed RobertsFather of the personal computer

Henry Edward Roberts coined the term "personal computer" and is considered to be the father of personal computers after he released of the Altair 8800 on December 19, 1974. It was later published on the front cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 making it almost instantly a huge success. The computer was available as a kit for $439 or assembled for $621 and had several additional add-ons such as a memory board and interface boards. By August 1975 over 5,000 Altair 8800 personal computers were sold and started the personal computer revolution.

Early Start

Computers have been around for quite a few years.  Some of your parents were probably around in 1951 when the first computer was bought by a business firm.  Computers have changed so rapidly many people can not keep up with changes.

One newspaper tried to relate how the fast changes in computer technology would look to a similar pace in the auto industry:

    "Had the automobile developed at a pace (equal) to that of the computer during the past twenty years, today a Rolls Royce would cost less than $3.00, get 3 million miles to the gallon, deliver enough power to drive (the ship) the Queen Elizabeth II, and six of them would fit on the head of a pin!"

These changes have occurred so rapidly that many people do not know how our modern computer got its start.

The First Computing Machines "Computers"

Since ancient times, people have had ways to deal with data and numbers.  Early people tied knots in rope and carved marks on clay tablets to keep track of livestock and trade.  Some people considered the 5000 year old ABACUS-- a frame with beads strung on wires to be the first true computing aid.

As trade and tax system grew in complexity, people saw that faster, more reliable and exact tools were needed for doing math and keeping records.

In the mid-1600's, Blaise Pascal and his father, who was a tax officer himself, were working on taxes for the French government in Paris.  The two spent hours figuring and refiguring taxes that each citizen owed.  Young Blaise decided in 1642 to build an adding and subtraction machine that could aide in such a tedious and time consuming process.  The machine Blaise made had a set of eight gears that worked together much like an odometer keeps track of a car's mileage.

 His machine encountered many of problems.  For one, it was always breaking down.  Second, the machine was slow and extremely costly.  And third, people were afraid to use the machine thinking it might replace their jobs.  Pascal later became famous for math and philosophy, but he is still remember for his role in computer technology.  In his honor, there is a computer language named Pascal.



The next big step for computers arrived in the 1830's when Charles Babbage decided to build a machine to help him complete and print mathematical tables.  Babbage was a mathematician who taught at Cambridge University in England.  He began planning his calculating machine calling it the Analytical Engine.  The idea for this machine was amazingly like the computer we know today.  It was to read a program from punched cards, figure and store the answers to different problems, and print the answer on paper.  Babbage died before he could complete the machine.  However because of his remarkable ideas and work, Babbage is know as the Father of Computers.

The next huge step for computers came when Herman Hollerith entered a contest given by the U.S. Census Bureau.  The contest was to see who could build a machine that would count and record information faster.  Hollerith, a young man working for the Bureau built a machine called the Tabulating Machine that read and sorted data from punched cards.  The holes punched in the cards matched each person's answers to questions.  For example, married, single, and divorces were answers on the cards.  The Tabulator read the punched cards as they passed over tiny brushes.  Each time a brush found a hole, it completed an electrical circuit.  This caused special counting dials to increase the data for that answer.

Thanks to Hollerith's machine, instead of taking seven and a half years to count the census information it only took three years, even with 13 million more people since the last census.  Happy with his success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896.  The company later was sold in 1911.  And in 1912 his company became the International Business Machines Corporation, better know today as IBM.

The First Electric Powered Computer
What is considered to be the first computer was made in 1944 by Harvard's Professor Howard Aiken.  The Mark I computer was very much like the design of Charles Babbage's having mainly mechanical parts, but with some electronic parts.  His machine was designed to be programmed to do many computer jobs.  This all-purpose machine is what we now know as the PC or personal computer.  The Mark I was the first computer financed by IBM and was about 50 feet long and 8 feet tall.  It used mechanical switches to open and close its electric circuits.  It contained over 500 miles of wire and 750,000 parts.

The First All Electronic Computer
The first all electronic computer was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer).  ENIAC was a general purpose digital computer built in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.
The ENIAC contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes (used instead of the mechanical switches of the Mark I) and was 1000 times faster than the Mark I.  In twenty seconds, ENIAC could do a math problem that would have taken 40 hours for one person to finish.  The ENIAC was built the time of World War II had as its first job to calculate the feasibility of a design for the hydrogen bomb.  The ENIAC was 100 feet long and 10 feet tall.



M ore Modern Computers
A more modern type computer began with John von Neumann's development of software written in binary code.  It was von Neumann who began the practice of storing data and instructions in binary code and initiated the use of memory to store data, as well as programs.  A computer called the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer) was built using binary code in 1950.  Before the EDVAC, computers like the ENIAC could do only one task then they had to be rewired to perform a different task or program.  The EDVAC's concept of storing different programs on punched cards instead of rewiring computers led to the computers that we know today.

While the modern computer is far better and faster than the EDVAC of its time, computers of today would not have been possible with the knowledge and work of many great inventors and pioneers.




When was the first computer invented?

Question

Answer


There is no easy answer to this question because of all the different classifications of computers. Therefore, this document has been created with a listing of each of the first computers starting with the first automatic computing engines leading up to the computers of today. Keep in mind that early inventions such as the abacus, calculators, and tablet machines are not accounted for in this document.

First mechanical computer or automatic computing engine concept

In 1822, Charles Babbage purposed and began developing the Difference Engine, considered to be the first automatic computing engine that was capable of computing several sets of numbers and making a hard copies of the results. Unfortunately, because of funding he was never able to complete a full-scale functional version of this machine. In June of 1991, the London Science Museum completed the Difference Engine No 2 for the bicentennial year of Babbage's birth and later completed the printing mechanism in 2000.

Later, in 1837 Charles Babbage proposed the first general mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine contained an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), basic flow control, and integrated memory and is the first general-purpose computer concept. Unfortunately, because of funding issues this computer was also never built while Charles Babbage's was alive. In 1910, Henry Babbage, Charles Babbage's youngest son was able to complete a portion of this machine and was able to perform basic calculations.

First programmable computer

The Z1, originally created by Germany's Konrad Zuse in his parents living room in 1936 to 1938 is considered to be the first electro-mechanical binary programmable (modern) computer and really the first functional computer.

The first electric programmable computer

The Colossus was the first electric programmable computer and was developed by Tommy Flowers and first demonstrated in December 1943. The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages.

The first digital computer

Short for Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the ABC started being developed by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry in 1937 and continued to be developed until 1942 at the Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). The ABC was an electrical computer that used vacuum tubes for digital computation including binary math and Boolean logic and had no CPU. On October 19, 1973, the US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent by Eckert and Mauchly was invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer.

The ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in 1943 and was not completed until 1946. It occupied about 1,800 square feet and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons. Although the Judge ruled that the ABC computer was the first digital computer, many still consider the ENIAC to be the first digital computer because it was fully functional.


The first stored program computer

The early British computer known as the EDSAC is considered to be the first stored program electronic computer. The computer performed its first calculation on May 6, 1949 and was the computer that ran the first graphical computer game, nicknamed "Baby".

The first computer company

The first computer company was the Electronic Controls Company and was founded in 1949 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the same individuals who helped create the ENIAC computer. The company was later renamed to EMCC or Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and released a series of mainframe computers under the UNIVAC name.

First stored program computer

First delivered to the United States Government in 1950, the UNIVAC 1101 or ERA 1101 is considered to be the first computer that was capable of storing and running a program from memory.

First commercial computer

In 1942, Konrad Zuse begin working on the Z4, which later became the first commercial computer after being sold to Eduard Stiefel a mathematician of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich on July 12, 1950.

The first PC (IBM compatible) computer

On April 7, 1953 IBM publicly introduced the 701, its first electric computer and first mass produced computer. Later IBM introduced its first personal computer called the IBM PC in 1981. The computer was code named and still sometimes referred to as the Acorn and had a 8088 processor, 16 KB of memory, which was expandable to 256 and utilizing MS-DOS.

The first computer with RAM

 MIT introduces the Whirlwind machine on March 8, 1955, a revolutionary computer that was the first digital computer with magnetic core RAM and real-time graphics.

The first transistor computer

The TX-O (Transistorized Experimental computer) is the first transistorized computer to be demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.




The first minicomputer

In 1960, Digital Equipment Corporation released its first of many PDP computers the PDP-1.

The first mass-market PC

In 1968, Hewlett Packard began marketing the first mass-marketed PC, the HP 9100A.

The first workstation

Although it was never sold, the first workstation is considered to be the Xerox Alto, introduced in 1974. 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.

The first microprocessor

Intel introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004 on November 15, 1971.

The first personal computer

In 1975, Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair 8800. Although the first personal computer is considered by many to be the Kenback-1, which was first introduced for $750 in 1971. The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights.

The Micral is considered the be the first commercial non-assembly computer. The computer used the Intel 8008 processor and sold for $1,750 in 1973.

The first laptop or portable computer

IBM 5100The IBM 5100 is the first portable computer, which was released on September 1975. The computer weighed 55 pounds and had a five inch CRT display, tape drive, 1.9MHz PALM processor, and 64KB of RAM. In the picture to the right, is an ad of the IBM 5100 taken from a November 1975 issue of Scientific America.

The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I, which was released on April 1981 and developed by Adam Osborne. The Osborne I was developed by Adam Osborne and weighed 24.5 pounds, had a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, two 5 1/4" floppy drives, ran the CP/M 2.2 operating system, included a modem, and cost US$179.

The IBM PC Division (PCD) later released the IBM portable in 1984, it's first portable computer that weighed in at 30 pounds. Later in 1986, IBM PCD announced it's first laptop computer, the PC Convertible, weighing 12 pounds. Finally, in 1994, IBM introduced the IBM ThinkPad 775CD, the first notebook with an integrated CD-ROM.

The first Apple computer

Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple known as the Apple I computer in 1976.

The first PC clone

The Compaq Portable is considered to be the first PC clone and was release in March 1983 by Compaq. The Compaq Portable was 100% compatible with IBM computers and was capable of running any software developed for IBM computers.

    * See the below other major computer companies first for other IBM compatible computers

The first multimedia computer

In 1992, Tandy Radio Shack becomes one of the first companies to release a computer based on the MPC standard with its introduction of the M2500 XL/2 and M4020 SX computers.

Other major computer company firsts

Below is a listing of some of the major computers companies first computers.

Compaq - In March 1983, Compaq released its first computer and the first 100% IBM compatible computer the "Compaq Portable."
Dell - In 1985, Dell introduced its first computer, the "Turbo PC."
Hewlett Packard - In 1966, Hewlett Packard released its first general computer, the "HP-2115."
NEC - In 1958, NEC builds its first computer the "NEAC 1101."
Toshiba - In 1954, Toshiba introduces its first computer, the "TAC" digital computer.