Who invented 1 computer. Why we are always behind: how the first computer was created in Russia and what came of it. Information revolutions in history

Today it is difficult to imagine that at least one house does not have a computer or laptop. that they even stopped remembering, or even did not know how the history of these devices began. In order to find out who invented the first computer, you need to clarify what kind of device we are talking about. After all, simple computers were also considered a computer, and the invention of the electronic version of this device occurred a little later. Let's try to figure out who invented the first computer and when did it happen?

Who created the very first computer: the first computers of antiquity

If we rely on historical facts, we can say that the first computer device existed three thousand years before our era. The sages of ancient Babylon came up with a kind of computing device that was quite capacious and very inconvenient to use. Then this issue was interested in the Middle Ages, but no one was able to fully realize their ideas. It happened because the people who lived in these times behaved as follows:

they were afraid of everything new and unknown, and the ideas of scientists seemed to them something funny and even scary;
believed that this could not really be and these machines threaten their family;
they didn’t want to support talented inventors just because they would have to sacrifice their savings to bring the scientist’s idea to life.

TO then came up with the first computer: the Pascal language

Time passed, generations changed, and with them a new worldview came.

V mid-17th century Pascal invented the first computer- a digital computer, and progress temporarily stopped there. It is traditionally believed that the binary system he invented laid the foundation for programming, and he became the discoverer of technology. However, this is not quite true.

After the efforts of Pascal for a while, everyone forgot about computing. But already in the 20th century, this topic again interested scientists, huge efforts were expended to ensure that progress began in the field of high technologies.

Who createdfirst computer?

The topical issue of creating "artificial intelligence" has become in Europe. The military was especially interested in this topic. Already in 1941, a trial, programmed computer Z1 appeared. After it came a more convenient modification - Z3. They became the prototypes of modern technology. The latest model was assembled by Condor Zuse. In 1942, the famous American physicist John Atanasoff and his young graduate student Clifford Berry began assembling the world's first electronic computer. At that time it had the name ENIAK.

They assembled the first electronic computer perfectly, but still, who invented the first computer, or rather, the scheme of its device in fact?

The founder of the idea and inventor of the first electronic computer in the world became a famous American engineer and physicist John Mauchly. This is the only correct answer to the question of who invented the first electronic computer. But people could not use this device for a long time due to the fact that:

the first electronic computer was huge in size and for its correct placement, space was required, which was equal to the area of three apartments;
working with such a giant was inconvenient and very difficult;
the weight of the device was 28 tons, which is thousands of times more than the weight of a modern computer;
it was very unprofitable to produce such technical devices, and this forced them to be completely abandoned.

But science does not stand still and progress is moving forward, and now the first personal computer has appeared.

The invention of the personal computer - an event that changed the world

After a successful attempt to create an electronic computer, other scientists decided to repeat and even surpass the success of their colleague John Mauchly and worked on the invention of the PC. Such personal computers were in everyone's homes until recently, they appeared in 1970. And it all started with simple computers.

New features were added to the device, which later began to be used in the development of laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and smartphones. So, less than a hundred years later, an entire technical industry emerged from the first electronic computer.

The computer era began with one very simple but interesting invention. And even if the bulk of humanity is no longer interested in who invented the first computer and how it appeared, but people who are engaged in the production of modern technology of such a plan will always remember the name of John Mokkli. It was this person who gave a good impetus and gathered talented individuals into a team and made them believe in their project. Who knows, if not for his inventions, perhaps all ideas would have remained at the level of simple, unrealized ideas. Thanks to this invention, the world has become simpler and.

First computer: video

A modern person cannot even imagine life without a computer. But somewhere in the 50s of the 20th century, people believed that a computer was needed only in order to calculate flight paths to the stars. And even earlier, even the word "computer" was not known. Let's dive into the history of computers.

What year was the computer invented

The very word "computer" means "computer". Already a long time ago, people needed to invent a device that could automatically process data, calculate. It is very difficult to say who and when invented the computer, since you first need to decide what is considered this very computing and data processing device.

In the first half of the 19th century, Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, made an attempt to create a universal computer. This analytical engine was supposed to perform calculations on its own without human assistance. But the mathematician could not complete his work, for the technology of that time it turned out to be too difficult. But thanks to him, the followers got all the basic ideas.

In 1941, the German engineer Conard Zuse and in 1943 the American Howard Aiken took advantage of Babbage's ideas and nevertheless built such an analytical engine!

Who invented the modern computer

Charles Babbage can be called the one who first invented the computer, or the creator of the first prototype of the computer. But still, the first really working machine that solved practical problems was ENIAC. This is a computer designed specifically for the needs of the army, for calculating the ballistic tables of aviation and artillery.

In 1946, the world learned that the world's first computer, ENIAC, had been launched in the United States. The abbreviation stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (Electronic Digital Integrator and Computer). It took about half a million dollars to build. They worked on it for about three years. The dimensions of the car are simply amazing! It weighed 28 tons and consumed 140 kW of energy. Just imagine that the first computer was cooled by Chrysler aircraft engines.

Now everything is much simpler, almost every house has a computer, and someone has more than one. For some, it is necessary for work, while for others it is communication and leisure activities.

People around the world use computers every day to work, communicate, search for information on the Internet, watch movies and TV shows, play games and much more. But when and who gave people the opportunity to do this? In the modern world of technological progress, it is difficult to imagine life without a PC. Today's pupils and students cannot imagine life without a computer: writing abstracts and reports by hand, looking for information in libraries, not Wikipedia ... So, who and when invented the first computer in the world?

background

The answer to the question of when the first computer appeared goes back to the distant past, the main purpose of which was to simplify mathematical calculations. For this, as early as the third millennium BC, ancient Babylon appeared the very first abacus(from Latin abacus "board, counting board"). However, they were used rather not to simplify the calculation, but to remember intermediate values. With the help of abacus, you can perform four arithmetic operations, as well as for calculating square roots and roots of the third degree.

Mechanical and automatic computers

The next in the list of progenitors of the modern PC was an adding machine, designed to accurately calculate four actions, and an arithmograph, a mechanical calculating machine that automatically recorded numbers on a special tape. Known to the history of the whole world, Leonardo da Vinci was the one who first depicted a diagram of a mechanism similar to an adding machine, but his ideas were not recognized and disseminated.
The first adding machine in history appeared in the middle of 1623 - counting clock by Wilhelm Schickard. The device consisted of series-connected gears and served to perform addition, multiplication and storage of intermediate calculations.
Blaise Pascal's Pascalina, invented in 1642, had a similar internal structure, and for a long time was considered the first mechanical counting device. The summing machine was a box with gears, on the panel of which there were wheels with numbers from 1 to 9, designed to enter numbers that were added. The answer was displayed in the upper part of the body. Adding machine she could not only fold, although this required some additional effort.

Also in the 17th century, the Leibniz adding machine (1673) and the Moreland machine (1674) were created. In 1709, the Marquis Giovanni de Poleni from Italy introduced his version of the adding machine. In the 50s of the XIX century, Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev created the first adding machine in Russia.
At the beginning of the 17th century, the English astronomer Edmund Gunther proposed putting a logarithmic scale on a ruler and using compasses to perform addition and subtraction with logarithms. In the 1620s, the English mathematician Edmund Wingate improved this ruler with two additional scales, and in 1622 William Oughtred published his version of the device in the treatise Circles of Proportions. Actually, William is considered the author of the first slide rule, which until 1633 was circular. The following improvements are due to Robert Bissaker (1654), Seth Patridge (1657) and Thomas Everard (1683). The familiar slider on the device appeared thanks to the French engineer and mathematician Victor Mayer Amed Mannheim only by the middle of the 19th century.
One of the most important steps in the history of the appearance of the PC was the appearance in 1801 of Joseph Marie Jaccard's punched card, used for automatic data processing. Such a card is the first version of the modern binary code, where instead of zeros and ones, the presence or absence of holes on the cardboard is used. Joseph used such a device to automatically control patterns on fabrics in looms.

The work of bookkeepers was greatly simplified when, in 1822, the English mathematician Charles Babbage designed a model of a difference engine, the first idea of which belongs to the German engineer Johann Müller and dates back to 1788. The mechanical apparatus was called the analytical engine of Charles Babbage and served to automate calculations by successive approximations of functions by polynomials and the calculation of finite differences.

difference engine

Thanks to the opportunity to represent logarithmic and trigonometric functions in polynomials, this device is a fairly universal computing tool and thus can replace up to 20 bookkeepers with manual arithmometers. Some time later, Martin Wiberg from Sweden improved the device and used it to calculate and publish logarithmic tables.

The history of the invention of the computer

Electromechanical Computing Tools

The first electromechanical device for the calculation was a tabulator built by the American Herman Hollerith, designed to speed up the processing of the results of the 1890 census in the United States. The machine summarized and sorted information written in numbers or letters on punched cards, and gave the result on paper tape or special forms. Such devices were used for a long time for processing arrays of information before electronic computers spread.

The breakthrough was invention of the German engineer Konrad Zuse Z3 created in 1941. This device was the first full-featured program-controlled and binary-programmable machine and had the properties inherent in a modern PC. Three years before the introduction of the Z3, Zuse introduced the Z1 to the world, which was limited in programmability and differed mainly from the final model in the absence of a square root function. In 1939, the engineer completed the second version of the computer, which became the world's first electromechanical computer put into operation. the very first computers in the world.

The success of creating devices was the implementation of their work in the form of a binary system, which by the 20th century was not something supernatural, but Konrad managed to combine the knowledge of other scientists and create the first programmable computer on their basis.

August 7, 1944 at Harvard University, after passing a series of successful tests, the first American fully programmable and not required human participation computer "Mark 1" was launched - automatic calculator sequence-driven. The machine was designed and built in 1941 under an agreement with IBM on the basis of Babbage's work.

Actually "Mark 1" is an advanced manual adding machine, but thanks to its programming ability, many call it the first real working computer. The machine read information from a perforated tape, and cyclic processes were performed by shorting the beginning and end of the tape being read.

Electronic computers

The concept of "electronic computer" should be distinguished from the broader "computer", since the computer implies the use of electronic components as functional units, while calculations can also be made in a number of other ways. The first computers were ENIAC (1946, USA), Manchester Small Experimental Machine, also known as Baby (1948, UK) and EDSAC (1949, UK).
April 7, 1964 IBM announced the creation of System 360 computers. This series subsequently became an example of an open standard, in other words, the compatibility of equipment manufactured by different manufacturers. All models, regardless of their size and shape, had typical details. Thus, the customer could purchase a relatively budget model and in the future, if necessary, upgrade it to a larger system. In fact, it was IBM / 360 that set the standard for the 8-bit byte and introduced the hexadecimal number system into widespread use in programming, and also became the first 32-bit computer system.

Personal computers

A personal computer (PC or PC - personal electronic computer), so familiar to modern man - a desktop micro-computer, which is a household appliance with universal functionality.
The first PC was the H316 Desktop Computer released by Honeywell in 1969. The device cost $10,600 and weighed as much as 45 kg. One of the main purposes of this device was the storage of various recipes, hence the second name "Kitchen Computer".
The decisive role in the emergence of the PC was played by the invention of the i4004 microprocessor by Intel employees in 1971, which could reproduce all the functions of a mainframe processor on a single chip.

In just a few years, the computer has managed to enter into human life so tightly that it has become almost impossible to imagine one's existence without it. With its help, you can not only type texts, but also listen to music, watch movies, communicate online and much more. It’s hard to imagine that a few decades ago it simply didn’t exist! But it was so until those who invented the computer showed it to the world.

Undoubtedly, at first it was exclusively a computing machine and was used by a narrow circle of scientists. But today, almost everyone has a personal computer or laptop. You use it every day, but do you know when, where and who invented the computer? But this is quite an interesting question. Let's figure it out.

When and where was the computer invented?

People have always sought to automate calculations in order to facilitate this time-consuming process. Such attempts have been made for a long time: an abacus from an old Chinese abacus, the famous Antikythera mechanism from Greece - these are all the forerunners of the modern computer.

Many famous scientists worked on the development in modern times: Leibniz, Müller, Pascal and others. The result of their labors was the invention in 1820 of the adding machine.

The first semblance of a computer appeared in Tokyo. In 1941, a universal analytical room was designed and built, which could perform the assigned tasks without human intervention. Z3 - this was the name of this achievement of science.

Who is the creator?

Yes, the first PC was built in Japan. But who invented it, who invented the computer? Few people know that back in the 19th century, an English mathematician conceived and developed a plan for such an analytical engine. He even managed to create its prototype, but he could not find the finances for the full implementation of the project.

In 1946, the American company ENIAC, guided by the projects of Mauchli and Eckert, made transistors. They worked on its development for about three years, spent half a million US dollars. This machine could be reprogrammed and used to solve all kinds of problems. However, such a computer turned out to be a very impressive device. It weighed about 28 tons and was cooled by aircraft engines! In 1971, the floppy disk drive and the first microprocessor were invented.

However, such computers were huge and expensive devices that only large enterprises and government agencies could afford ...

The first mini-device in 1965 was created by Digital Equipment Corporation. They called it the PDP-8, and it was no bigger than… a refrigerator. A few more models followed, but not much less.

Who invented the personal computer that we are used to seeing?

The decisive step towards what we use today was made in 1976 by two young Americans - Wozniak and Jobs. They developed a device designed for video games that could also be programmed. They named it "Apple". Subsequently, he created a corporation with the same name, which took up the production of personal computers.

Well, in 1986, IBM made a device with a 16-bit Intel processor and software developed by Microsoft. Already by the beginning of the 1990s. It is these devices that have become a subject of mass use.

The path of the computer to the device familiar to us today was quite long and difficult. Today everything is much easier. There is a PC in almost every home, some have more than one. And we should be grateful to those who invented the computer and worked to improve it. After all, this device has become almost indispensable for each of us. Someone needs it for work, and someone for communication and just a good time.