A Brief History of Personal Computers :: essays research papers

A Brief memorial of Personal ComputersThe electronic reckoner is a relatively modern innovation the first fully operable computer was developed about 50 eld ago, at the end of being War II, by a team at the University of Pennsylvanias Moore School of Engineering. This team was headed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, who named the new machine ENIAC, for electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was just now a personal computer, occupying a large room and weighing about 33 tons. By todays standards, ENIAC was extremely slow, unreliable, and expensive to operate. In 1945, on the other hand, it was considered a marvel.Over the next 30 years, computers became low-spiriteder, faster, and less expensive. However, most of these machines remained iso posthumousd in their own air-conditioned rooms, tended by specially ingenious personnel. By 1975, computers were in large demand at universities, government agencies, and large businesses, but relatively few people had ever come face-to-face with an existing computer. This all began to change in the late 1970s.To understand why, lets take a closer look at the early computers. ENIAC and its immediate successors were large, slow, and unreliable primarily because they utilize thousands of large, slow, and unreliable vacuum tubes in their electronic circuits. The vacuum tubes were glass cylinders, typically about four buttes high and an inch in diameter, which generated a lot of warmness and thus could not be placed too close together. Then, in 1947, a momentous event occurred at Bell Labs - William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain announced the invention of the transistor. Only about an inch long and a quarter inch across, a transistor produced very little heat, and did the same job as a vacuum tube.The downsizing of computers began in the 1950s as transistors replaced vacuum tubes, and continued into the 1960s with the introduction of the integrated circuit (IC) - an ice cube-sized pa ckage containing hundreds of transistors. By the late 1960s, microchips, consisting of thousands of electronic components residing on a piece of silicon the size of a postage stamp, had begun to replace ICs. At this time, some minicomputers occupied a space no larger than a small filing cabinet and cost less than $25,000. Then, in 1970, Marcian Hoff, Jr., working at Intel Corporation, invented the microprocessor, a central processing unit on a chip. The technological man was now ready for the personal computer.The First Personal ComputerA Brief History of Personal Computers essays research papers A Brief History of Personal ComputersThe electronic computer is a relatively modern invention the first fully operable computer was developed about 50 years ago, at the end of World War II, by a team at the University of Pennsylvanias Moore School of Engineering. This team was headed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, who named the new machine ENIAC, for Electronic Numerical Integra tor and Calculator. ENIAC was hardly a personal computer, occupying a large room and weighing about 33 tons. By todays standards, ENIAC was extremely slow, unreliable, and expensive to operate. In 1945, on the other hand, it was considered a marvel.Over the next 30 years, computers became smaller, faster, and less expensive. However, most of these machines remained isolated in their own air-conditioned rooms, tended by specially trained personnel. By 1975, computers were in great demand at universities, government agencies, and large businesses, but relatively few people had ever come face-to-face with an actual computer. This all began to change in the late 1970s.To understand why, lets take a closer look at the early computers. ENIAC and its immediate successors were large, slow, and unreliable primarily because they used thousands of large, slow, and unreliable vacuum tubes in their electronic circuits. The vacuum tubes were glass cylinders, typically about four inches high and a n inch in diameter, which generated a lot of heat and thus could not be placed too close together. Then, in 1947, a momentous event occurred at Bell Labs - William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain announced the invention of the transistor. Only about an inch long and a quarter inch across, a transistor produced very little heat, and did the same job as a vacuum tube.The downsizing of computers began in the 1950s as transistors replaced vacuum tubes, and continued into the 1960s with the introduction of the integrated circuit (IC) - an ice cube-sized package containing hundreds of transistors. By the late 1960s, microchips, consisting of thousands of electronic components residing on a piece of silicon the size of a postage stamp, had begun to replace ICs. At this time, some minicomputers occupied a space no larger than a small filing cabinet and cost less than $25,000. Then, in 1970, Marcian Hoff, Jr., working at Intel Corporation, invented the microprocessor, a central p rocessing unit on a chip. The technological world was now ready for the personal computer.The First Personal Computer