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Did you know that computers used to be up to eighty feet long? Well, that should show you just how much downsizing inventors have done on computers over the years. Even though our computers today are small, they still are more powerful than the largest computer ever made. I was surprised to learn about all the changes the computer has gone through, and I bet you will be, too.

Calculators

Computers originally began as calculators. The first calculator only had eight buttons, and it could only do addition and subtraction. This first calculator was made by Blaise Pascal. His machine was 20"x4" x3" and made out of metal. The way that it worked was there was a set of wheels, and all of the wheels had the numbers zero through nine on them. The wheels were connected by gears and each turn of one wheel would turn the next wheel one-tenth of a turn. He built the machine because his father, a tax collector, made so many counting errors when he was counting all of the peoples’ taxes. His machine was completed in 1642 when he was twenty-one years old. Between 1642 and 1820, about twenty-five manufacturers were making some type of calculating machine, but Pascal’s was the first.

Mark 1

After all of the calculator madness, many people started to try to invent some type of computer. It wasn’t until the mid-1900’s when the first computer was made. The inventor’s name was Howard Aiken. Aiken’s machine was gigantic. It was eighty feet long and eight feet high. He completed it in 1944. He called his invention the Mark 1. The Mark 1 could calculate gigantic mathematics problems, as well as performing more than one operation at a time. It could perform these functions at five to six times faster than the average human. Aiken created this machine to prove a theory that he had about vacuum tubes.

ENIAC

The University of Pennsylvania and the United States government wanted something that would work even faster. They joined forces behind the creation of an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, also known as the ENIAC for short. They had two leaders, J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, who created a machine that was 1,000 times faster than Aiken’s Mark 1, which had only been introduced two years earlier. The only bad thing about this machine, the ENIAC, was that it took a small power plant to run it. The ENIAC could figure out World War II ballistic firing tables. Ballistic firing tables were what the military used to determine if a plane that they were going to shoot down would hit anything else. The ENIAC could do these calculations a lot faster than a human could.

Altair

You’re probably wondering how our computers of today are so small, when not that many years ago they were huge. The way they did that was by creating a transistor. The transistor was a device that could make a computer smaller in size by having a much smaller computer chip. It was not as powerful as the ENIAC, but the transistor was the beginning of making the computer smaller, cheaper, and more reliable. The inventor of the transistor was Ed Roberts. He called his machine the Altair. The way he sold his machine was by presenting it in a kit that you would assemble yourself. The good part was that kept the price down to $395, since it came unassembled. Roberts created his machine twenty-six years ago in 1975, so it wasn’t that long ago.

The Altair was the machine that Bill Gates used to get started with his company, Microsoft, which is one of the largest computer companies in the world. However, since the Altair didn’t have a screen or a keyboard, it looked more like a radio with a lot of switches instead of a computer. The Altair may not have been better than the ENIAC, but the ENIAC was more than 500 time the size. The Altair could do enough for the average person. It could perform counting tasks and it could keep one or two things in its memory. You could not type a paper since there was no screen, but people seemed to like using it.

Making Computers Smaller and More Powerful

So, how did we get from the transistor Altair, which was considered a small computer for its time, to the computers of today? We have learned how to make the computers smaller and more powerful. You must also realize that computers have gone from only scientists having them, to now where just about every home in America has at least one computer in it today. This is all partly because of the Internet. The first time the Internet was used was in 1969 at UCLA, but not many knew about it. That sure changed in the 1990’s. The 1990’s were when everyone learned about the Internet and what it could do. Once people figured out that there was something called the Internet that allowed you to connect to others and retrieve information from a computer, everyone started to purchase their own computers.

Computers have also changed a lot in cost. At the beginning it was only the wealthier people who had them. Today almost everyone is able to afford a computer for their own use. Computers have become portable in the form of a laptop, and some can even fit in the palm of your hand. Today, the world is very computer based which has allowed everyone to be connected throughout the world by computers and the Internet. For example, people can purchase items online, talk to friends and family, and even send photographs over the Internet. Imagine trying that with Howard Aiken’s Mark 1!

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