The Evolution of Computers

The Evolution of the Computer Age

Many of us probably can’t remember a world without computers. However, for some of us, computers were virtually unknown when we were born. Technology has rapidly changed and come of age during our lifetime. There have been many predecessors to what we think of as the modern computer going back as far as the 18th century. The history and evolution of computers is quite extraordinary. We will explore the development and progression of computers in this paper. Although, the early mechanical computers bore little resemblance to the computers in use today, they paved the way for a number of technologies that are used by modern computers, or were instrumental in their development.

The 1st Generation of Computers – Vacuum Tube Age (1951 – 1957)

During the first generation, computers were built with vacuum tubes, electronic tubes that were made of glass and were about the size of a light bulb. In 1951 Dr. John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr. introduced the first commercially available electronic digital computer called the Univac and it was built with vacuum tubes. The Univac was based off an earlier invention by the 2 called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), which had been designed in 1946. In 1952 another development team led by Dr. Grace Hopper, a former Navy programmer, introduced what was called the A6 Complier, which was the first example of software that converted high-level language symbols into instructions in which a computer could execute. Then there was the FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) introduced in 1957 by John Backus & IBM. The first widely used high-level programming language.

The 2nd Generation of Computers – The Transitor Age (1958 – 1963)

The inventors of the transistor were John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain, who were all scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

The second generation began with the first computers that were built...