Saturday, 11 February 2017

THE EVOLUTION OF COMPUTER

Computer, it has become a member of our family these days .... No! No! Organ of our body would be precise. Yeah we use it for shopping, social networking, gaming, to program, and Automation, and make yourself lazy.....

Now, let's go to the time when there were no computers....

The Early 1800's :-

Before the computer was invented, the word "computer" was used to describe a person who's job was to calculate... They used to calculate all day. And "Charles Babage" who is now known as "The father of computer" was also a computer and was bored of being a computer ... I mean, bored of doing his job .... And he thought..

"If the Machines can do physical work.... Why can't they do mental work?"

With that simple thought, the idea of the computer as we know it was born.

Now, we'll move forward in time,

Jumping to the 1930's,

It was when the rise of Hitler and the Hindenburg disaster happened. It is said that, "During the toughest times, we come up with the greatest inventions"
"Conrad Zeus" you can loosely say this guy is the inventor of the computer... We still use his invention. When he was in his work, and was doing some engineering calculations, he thought,

"Why shouldn't machines do my work?"

With that idea, he left his job, went to his parents home to build his computer. He observed that the mathematics we do has only 10 numbers and some special symbols, and the answer, THE BINARY, that was a legendary thought which the world still uses today. This computer was built using magnetic switches which had difficulties handling and was later replaced by magnetic telephone switches. And later in a interview, when he was asked "how did you come up with the binary??" He said "I was lazy"!!!!


 After a decade, in the 1940's two guys named: "John mauchly" and "J Eckert" used "John Ambrose Fleming's" invention, "The vaccum tube" to build ENIAC. It was a computer consisting of 18000 vaccum tubes.

In ENIAC if they wanted to change a program, they had to reset everything and it literally took days just to change a program.

But now, we change a program with a double click or a tap.

Going to the next decade, 1950's,

The computer went public... But no one wanted it and the culprit, that Dudgy vaccum tubes. It should be replaced by something.. that was the TRANSISTOR.
"A Transistor was 100 times lighter and 1/50th of the size  of the vaccum tube.



The 1960's

#the_moon_landing
#vietnam_war
#some_revolutionary_music

During this time the TRANSISTOR was replace by the INTEGRATED CIRCUITS.
  When the Russians sent a man to space.. the American president, Kennedy wanted NASA to send a crew to space and they had succeeded. The mobile phone we use today is, 2200 times faster and 30,00,000 times the memory of the appolo 2 guidance computer.
The first Integrated circuit had 10 transistors printed on it and costed upto 10,000$

The 1970's

In this decade the change took a long jump.. that is because of the invention of the "MICROPROCESSOR" by a small company then called "INTEL"


Now, thousands of transistors can be printed on a single chip!!!

In 1973, a printer company called Xerox, by the inspiration of Douglas Angleberg's invention , there built a computer as we know it today... It had a keyboard, mouse and they did it 10 years before any other company did.
In the same decade, Steve jobs with his friend Steve Wozniak built a computer in Steve job's garage. Steve jobs saw the potential and wanted to give it to the world.
 With the collaboration of Mike markalo they started APPLE they named their computer 'Vizicalc' with this APPLE became the fastest growing company.

And IBM was sad.... It badly wanted to overtake apple.

And going to the 1980's,

Have a look at this picture,





It was a hard-disk back then. It weighed 250kg and costed 10000's of $. Guess the memory it stored... 250MB!!!!
Today's micro SD card holds 1000 times larger data!

In the 1980's IBM was still lagging behind and guess who helped IBM??, "Bill Gates"

He some how managed to build the MS-DOS and sold it to the IBM.

Earlier Steve jobs was invited to Xerox to checkout their computer. He was inspired by their work and wanted to build a computer with a mouse and a keyboard..

With that comes the "MACINTOSH"



Steve jobs eventually asked Bill Gates to build a software for his Mac, in the moment of pure blindness Steve jobs gave full access to his MACINTOSH which was an unliscenced software.
Bill gates later betrayed Steve jobs and copied the touch and feel of the MACINTOSH. Bill Gates named his software "Windows".

Later in the 1990's

Bill Gates released windows 3.0 which sold 3 Million copies and made MACINTOSH forgotten throughout the 90's. Just until Steve jobs came up with a small white box that restored apple's position in the tech industry.


Ok this article is already too long let's make this article 2 parts "The evolution of the computer part2" will be coming soon which includes the birth of the internet and the rise of smartphone etc.(spoiler)

As usual this is ANIRUDH DASARI signing off this week.















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