A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems, including

simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls, and factory devices
like industrial robots. Computers are at the core of general-purpose devices such as personal
computers and mobile devices such as smartphones. Computers power the Internet, which links
billions of computers and users.

Early computers were meant to be used only for calculations. Simple manual instruments like
the abacus have aided people in doing calculations since ancient times. Early in the Industrial
Revolution, some mechanical devices were built to automate long, tedious tasks, such as
guiding patterns for looms. More sophisticated electrical machines did
specialized analog calculations in the early 20th century. The first digital electronic calculating
machines were developed during World War II, both electromechanical and using thermionic
valves. The first semiconductor transistors in the late 1940s were followed by the silicon-
based MOSFET (MOS transistor) and monolithic integrated circuit chip technologies in the late
1950s, leading to the microprocessor and the microcomputer revolution in the 1970s. The
speed, power, and versatility of computers have been increasing dramatically ever since then,
with transistor counts increasing at a rapid pace (Moore's law noted that counts doubled every
two years), leading to the Digital Revolution during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Conventionally, a modern computer consists of at least one processing element, typically

a central processing unit (CPU) in the form of a microprocessor, together with some type
of computer memory, typically semiconductor memory chips. The processing element carries
out arithmetic and logical operations, and a sequencing and control unit can change the order
of operations in response to stored information. Peripheral devices include input devices
(keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc.), output devices (monitors, printers, etc.), and input/output
devices that perform both functions (e.g. touchscreens). Peripheral devices allow information to
be retrieved from an external source, and they enable the results of operations to be saved and
retrieved.

Etymology

A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952

It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to
the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different
sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait:
"I haue [sic] read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer [sic]
breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number." This usage of the term referred to
a human computer, a person who carried out calculations or computations. The word continued
to have the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. During the latter part of this
period, women were often hired as computers because they could be paid less than their male
counterparts.[1] By 1943, most human computers were women.[2]

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the first attested use of computer in the 1640s, meaning
'one who calculates'; this is an "agent noun from compute (v.)". The Online Etymology
Dictionary states that the use of the term to mean "'calculating machine' (of any type) is from
1897." The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the "modern use" of the term, to mean
'programmable digital electronic computer' dates from "1945 under this name; [in a] theoretical
[sense] from 1937, as Turing machine".[3] The name has remained, although modern computers
are capable of many higher-level functions.

History

Main articles: History of computing and History of computing hardware

For a chronological guide, see Timeline of computing.

Pre-20th century

The Ishango bone, a bone tool dating back to prehistoric Africa

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one
correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was most likely a form of tally stick.
Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones,
etc.) which represented counts of items, likely livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay
containers.[a][4] The use of counting rods is one example.

The Chinese suanpan (算盘). The number represented on this abacus is 6,302,715,408.

The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from
devices used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BCE. Since then, many other forms of reckoning
boards or tables have been invented. In a medieval European counting house, a checkered cloth
would be placed on a table, and markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an
aid to calculating sums of money.[5]

The Antikythera mechanism, dating back to ancient Greece circa 200–80 BCE, is an early analog
computing device.

The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer,
according to Derek J. de Solla Price.[6] It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was
discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera,
between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to approximately c. 100 BCE. Devices of
comparable complexity to the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until the fourteenth
century.[7]
Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and
navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in the early
11th century.[8] The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd
centuries BCE and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of
the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of
working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe
incorporating a mechanical calendar computer[9][10] and gear-wheels was invented by Abi Bakr
of Isfahan, Persia in 1235.[11] Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar
calendar astrolabe,[12] an early fixed-wired knowledge processing machine[13] with a gear
train and gear-wheels,[14] c. 1000 AD.

The sector, a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, trigonometry,
multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as squares and cube roots, was
developed in the late 16th century and found application in gunnery, surveying and navigation.

The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over
it with a mechanical linkage.

A slide rule

The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, by the English clergyman William Oughtred,
shortly after the publication of the concept of the logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog
computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development progressed, added
scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, as well
as transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular
and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions. Slide rules with special scales are still used for
quick performance of routine calculations, such as the E6B circular slide rule used for time and
distance calculations on light aircraft.

In the 1770s, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss watchmaker, built a mechanical doll (automaton) that
could write holding a quill pen. By switching the number and order of its internal wheels
different letters, and hence different messages, could be produced. In effect, it could be
mechanically "programmed" to read instructions. Along with two other complex machines, the
doll is at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and still operates.[15]

In 1831–1835, mathematician and engineer Giovanni Plana devised a Perpetual Calendar

machine, which through a system of pulleys and cylinders could predict the perpetual
calendar for every year from 0 CE (that is, 1 BCE) to 4000 CE, keeping track of leap years and
varying day length. The tide-predicting machine invented by the Scottish scientist Sir William
Thomson in 1872 was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys
and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location.
The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential
equations by integration, used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. In 1876,
Sir William Thomson had already discussed the possible construction of such calculators, but he
had been stymied by the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators.[16] In a
differential analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a
graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to work.
Starting in the 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others developed mechanical differential analyzers.

In the 1890s, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo began to develop a series of
advanced analog machines that could solve real and complex roots of polynomials,[17][18][19]
[20]
which were published in 1901 by the Paris Academy of Sciences.[21]

First computer

Charles Babbage

A diagram of a portion of Babbage's Difference engine

The Difference Engine Number 2 at the Intellectual Ventures laboratory in Seattle

Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath, originated the concept of a
programmable computer. Considered the "father of the computer",[22] he conceptualized and
invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century.

After working on his difference engine he announced his invention in 1822, in a paper to
the Royal Astronomical Society, titled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation
of astronomical and mathematical tables".[23] He also 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 punched cards,
a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom. 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 would incorporate
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.[24][25]

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 British Government to cease funding. Babbage's
failure to complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to political and financial
difficulties as well as 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 (the mill) in 1888. He gave a
successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906.

Electromechanical calculating machine

Electro-mechanical calculator (1920) by Leonardo Torres Quevedo.

In his work Essays on Automatics published in 1914, Leonardo Torres Quevedo wrote a brief
history of Babbage's efforts at constructing a mechanical Difference Engine and Analytical
Engine. The paper contains a design of a machine capable to calculate formulas like , for a
sequence of sets of values. The whole machine was to be controlled by a read-only program,
which was complete with provisions for conditional branching. He also introduced the idea
of floating-point arithmetic.[26][27][28] In 1920, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention
of the arithmometer, Torres presented in Paris the Electromechanical Arithmometer, which
allowed a user to input arithmetic problems through a keyboard, and computed and printed the
results,[29][30][31][32] demonstrating the feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine.[33]

Analog computers

Main article: Analog computer

Sir William Thomson's third tide-predicting machine design, 1879–81

During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by
increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model
of the problem as a basis for computation. However, these were not programmable and
generally lacked the versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers.[34] The first modern
analog computer was a tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir William Thomson (later to
become Lord Kelvin) in 1872. The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed
to solve differential equations by integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was
conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson, the elder brother of the more famous Sir William
Thomson.[16]

The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer,
completed in 1931 by Vannevar Bush at MIT.[35] By the 1950s, the success of digital electronic
computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but analog computers
remained in use during the 1950s in some specialized applications such as education (slide rule)
and aircraft (control systems).[citation needed]

Digital computers
Electromechanical

Claude Shannon's 1937 master's thesis laid the foundations of digital computing, with his insight
of applying Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits being the basic
concept which underlies all electronic digital computers.[36][37]

By 1938, the United States Navy had developed the Torpedo Data Computer, an
electromechanical analog computer for submarines that used trigonometry to solve the
problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. During World War II, similar devices were
developed in other countries.[38]

Replica of Konrad Zuse's Z3, the first fully automatic, digital (electromechanical) computer

Early digital computers were electromechanical; electric switches drove mechanical relays to
perform the calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually
superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes. The Z2,
created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939 in Berlin, was one of the earliest examples of
an electromechanical relay computer.[39]

Konrad Zuse, inventor of the modern computer[40][41]

In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3, the world's first working
electromechanical programmable, fully automatic digital computer.[42][43] The Z3 was built with
2000 relays, implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–
10 Hz.[44] Program code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of
memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some
respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating-point numbers. Rather than the
harder-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage's earlier design), using
a binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable,
given the technologies available at that time.[45] The Z3 was not itself a universal computer but
could be extended to be Turing complete.[46][47]

Zuse's next computer, the Z4, became the world's first commercial computer; after initial delay
due to the Second World War, it was completed in 1950 and delivered to the ETH Zurich.[48] The
computer was manufactured by Zuse's own company, Zuse KG, which was founded in 1941 as
the first company with the sole purpose of developing computers in Berlin.[48] The Z4 served as
the inspiration for the construction of the ERMETH, the first Swiss computer and one of the first
in Europe.[49]

Vacuum tubes and digital electronic circuits

Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical
equivalents, at the same time that digital calculation replaced analog. The engineer Tommy
Flowers, working at the Post Office Research Station in London in the 1930s, began to explore
the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange.