history

Pre-20th century

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one -to-one correspondence with fingers. Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented counts of items, probably livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay containers.

First computing device

Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath, originated the concept of a programmable computer. Considered the “father of computer”, he conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his revolutionary difference engine, designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that a much more general design, an Analytical engine, was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punch cards, a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard looms. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic ,unit,control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing complete.

The machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his machine had to be made by hand – this was a major problem for a device with thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was dissolved with the decision of the to cease funding. Babbage’s failure to complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to difficulties not only of politics and financing, but also to his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than anyone else could follow. Nevertheless, his son, Henry Babbage, completed a simplified version of the analytical engine’s computing unit in 1888. He gave a successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906.

which was the First programmable computer?

The Z1 was created by German Konrad Zuse in his parents’ living room between 1936 and 1938. It is considered to be the first electromechanical binary programmable computer, and the first really functional modern computer.