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IT for managers

Evolution of Computing Machines:

.1780: Benjamin Franklin discovers electricity.

• 1800: Alessandro Volta invents the first electric battery, the voltaic pile.

• 1823: Charles Babbage received a gold medal for his development of the difference engine. It was a mechanical device to perform programmable calculations considered the world’s first computer.

• 1831: Michael Faraday discovered electricity could be produced through motion when a magnet was moved inside a coil of copper wire, the first electric generator which he called a dynamo.

• 1842: Lady Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace uses the difference engine to mechanically translate a short written work. She is generally regarded as the first programmer.

• 1854: George Boole published ‘An investigation into the Laws of Thought’ which introduced the concept of Boolean algebra. These simplified logic formulas are the basis for modern computer logic circuits.

• 1876: Alexander Graham Bell US patent #174,465 was accepted for the invention of the telephone.

• 1882: Thomas Edison used a DC generator to provide electricity to light his laboratory and later to illuminate the first New York street to be lit by electric lamps. The following year he would discover the Edison Effect electric current flows in a vacuum.

• 1886: William Burroughs develops the first commercially successful mechanical adding machine.

• 1903: Nikola Tesla first patents electrical logic circuits called gates or switches based on the algebraic treatment of logic introduced by George Boole almost fifty years earlier.

• 1911: The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) founded later renamed IBM in 1924.

• 1928: Vladimir Zworykin invents the vacuum tube or cathode ray tube (CRT) based on the Edison Effect.

• 1937: Alan M. Turing Publishes his paper `On Computable Numbers..` that applies the notion of using algorithms for the computation of functions. His theoretical Turing machine is capable of computing any...