I had to do a research paper of the History of computing...since I am an acitve member of the greatest computer website in history I thought I would share it...

What is a computer? What exactly does it do? How does it work?
A computer is a device that we use for work, or a media device that we use for music, video, and games but have you ever considered where all this technology came from?
Historically computers were the name of the people who imputed punch-cards into a very early computers known by today’s standards as a calculator…I know it seems rather odd for someone let-alone more then 3 people to input punch-cards into a calculator. Well this is the beginning of the story of why they had too.
In the beginning computer machines were analog…not digital like the computer I’m typing this on. Back in the 1930’s a man by the name of Vannevar Bush builds the first large scale, automatic analog computer. Bush’s design was based on the wheel and disc integrator. Soon there after copies of his wonderful new general purpose computer where being used all over the world. Keeping the computer maintenance was no easy task. A skilled mechanic was needed along with a lead hammer in hand. Bush and his co-creators then re-designed the machine to use electromechanical components, then finally electronic devices.
In 1936, an Englishman by the name of Alan M. Turning invents the modern computer. He described an abstract digital computing machine the contains a bottomless pit of memory and a scanner that reads the memory. By the time World War 2 breaks out, Turning was leading cryptanalyst for the Government at a cyper school in Bletchey Park. There he became used to Thomas Flower’s work involving large scale, high speed electronic switching. Yet Turning couldn’t build a machine this great until after 1945.
The first fully functioning computer was built in 1944. It was known as Colossus Mark 1. It was invented by British code breakers to read German secret codes during WW2, Colossus Mark 1 was one of the first electronic digital computers, and designed by a man named Thomas Flowers. By June of 1944 ten of the Colossus Mark 11’s were constructed and installed. Colossus Mark 11 was an improved version of the Mark 1 prototype.
Ok, so there’s a brief history of computing in the 1930’s and 40’s where no one really cared about computers at this time, for one reason they were way to expensive, and way to hard to keep running, some computers of this time period were containing anywhere from 20,000 glass vacuum tubes, and 15,000 switches just to print a document on a teletype. You had to have a small army of handy/techy people who know what they were doing to be able to make any money off a computer. What computers were back in these days were giant, 35-ton calculators. That sums it up in a rather informative yet fast way…so let’s skip along into the early 1960’s when computers really began to take the public’s attention.
In the 1960’s a type-writer company named IBM comes into view creating a computer known as the IBM 650. The 650 is to most people the earliest ancestor to today’s personal computers, considering that most computers before it where made for Government companies in computer need such as AEC.
The 650 on a completely different page, was made to be affordable costing only 500 thousand dollars (pocket change). Another thing that set the 650 apart from the rest was that is was easy to use and programmed in decimal rather then binary, plus the fact it fit in a single room. In theory you’d think that something like the IBM 650 would sell off the shelves, being affordable, user-friendly, and compact. Well it did just that, IBM sold hundreds of them, and was the only computer that made a profit for it’s maker. Even more so when a man named Andre wrote an after-market programming manual for it.
In 1963 a guy called Doug Englebart invented the computer mouse, it was first called the X-Y position indicator, but who would really call it by that name?
That was just a quick piece or random computer info for yea…J
Anyway after the IBM 650, IBM comes out with the IBM 1620. Now the 1620 is the same size as the 650 but is more versatile. Being IBM’s first transistorized, low-end scientific computer, that’s a god bit for the hippy era. Like the 650 the 1620 was a decimal machine, each number was addressable and was 6 bits wide. Whoa…K
The coolest thing about the 1620 was that it did math digit by digit using a table look-up.
Ok, there are some hippy era computers for you, not much ground was covered in the 60’s but the technology that did occur propelled the 70’s into the ‘future of computers’
The 1970’s were probably the best years for computers, considering that a Canadian company named Commodore started making calculators around something called a Texas Instrument chip. That Doug Englebart guy patents his X-Y position indicator, pocket calculator was invented in 1971 costing only $250 a piece, in 72’ Bill Gates and Paul Allen form Traf-O-Data (eventually becomes Microsoft) In 1976, Shugart introduces the 5.25 floppy disk, In 1978 IBM reviles it’s Personal Computer, and in 1979 Kevin MacKenzie discovers the emoticon. J See…a lot of things did happen in the 1970s. A calculator empire became, the mouse was patented, personal wealth were acquired.
My favorite decade of the 1980’s…the decade I was born in. Let’s see what happened in the IT industry in the hair metal years. Ok, first off we have telecommuting (remote log-in and long-distance work) in 1980. 1981 provided us with Osborne introducing a world’s first portable computer, along with MS-DOS being released to the public, then we have cd-disk invented by SONY and Philips Europe and Japan.
1984 provides us with some extremely useful ideas, such as Apple releasing the 3.5 floppy disk, and the domain name system was established. Microsoft ships Windows 1.01 in the 1987, and in 1988 the 386 chip brings PC clock speeds into competition.
So then the 1990’s role around and computers by this time are a household name, IBM, Microsoft, Apple…were all household computer names. Computers were just evolving so fast it was almost unheard of. Take for example in 1991 the cd-r was invented along with WWW server addressing combines with URL, HTTP and HTML.
In 1994 Netscape was invented by a man named Marc Andreessen, in Mountain view, Cal. So half the decade goes by and 1996 comes around with 100,000 web servers only to be blown out of the water by 1997’s 650,000 web servers, and the world’s best chess player named Kasparov is beaten by a computer named Deep Blue 2. By the time the saying, partying like it’s 1999 becomes popular there are about 4 and a half million web servers out there hosting to internet surfers of all ages.
I hope you enjoyed this quick 3 page, over-view of computing in the 1900’s. Now we move on the second millennium. First thing I have to say about the 2000s is that stupid Y2K thing that happened at the beginning. Why would someone even come up with that? Nothing even happened did it? Well nothing happened to me…maybe I got lucky…I don’t know…anyway back to my paper.
During New Year’s eve of 1999 every single minded American was thinking that the world would end, and a nuclear holocaust was about to happen…Well it never happened…After that little Y2K scare happened computers just kept evolving just like they did in the 20th century. New companies came out, along with new technologies such as a PDA, game consoles, and mp3 players. All this technology would not have been able to happen if somebody didn’t hate doing math and tried to come up with something to make his/her life easier.
In 2000 Microsoft releases Windows 2000 to the public and Bill Gates retires from being CEO to MS, I couldn’t help but say being a man worth around 100 billion dollars? Would you? Anyway in 2001, Microsoft unveils the Xbox game console, in 2002 PCIe is approved as the standard expansion slot, along with PayPal being acquired on eBay.
In the middle years of 2000’s decade which is 2003 to 2006 here is what happened in those years…Music sharing giant Napster is shutdown, Mozilla Firefox is invented, MySpace is founded, Apple introduces Mac OS X 10.3, Google announces Gmail, Comcast purchases TechTv and changes it to G4TechTv, eBay buys Skype for 2.6 billion dollars, and Gregg Kaminski starts taking C.I.T at Lenape Vo-Tech..
This is my History of Computing Research paper…I really hope you enjoyed reading this…for I have enjoyed typing it, and learning a lot about computer history…Thank you


Please let me know what you think of it...

SG ... a very interesting string of historical to present computer events. Nicely done. Thanks, Df.

Very nice report!

Thanks Dragonfly and Pappy... I hope I get A's from yea both...

Yea you did good