History of the Computer

Who invented the Computer? Who conceived the idea first?

Well the first fully-automatic calculating machine, was constructed by British computing pioneer Charles Babbage (1791-1871), who first conceived the idea of an advanced calculating machine to calculate and print mathematical tables in 1812. In 1834 Babbage had devised another machine which he called the Analytical Machine. This was capable of carrying out any mathematical operation, with even higher powers of analysis than his original Difference engine of the 1820s. However, he needed funding for this project and had to persuade the government to provide more money. Babbage argued that it was cheaper to develop a new engine with more capability, rather than complete the Difference Engine . Lord Melbourne who was the current Prime Minister, and the Government could not see their way clear to funding a new machine until the old one was completed. So only part of the machine as a trial piece was completed before Babbage's death in 1871. 

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Alan Turing Mathematician father of modern computer science.

1912 - 1954

Alan Turing, a pioneering 20th century mathematician, is widely considered to be the father of modern computer science. It was his idea of creating a machine to turn thought processes into numbers which was one of the key turning points in the history of electronic boxes and screens.  Turing was born in London in 1912 into an upper-middle class family and displayed a fascination for science throughout childhood.

Turing believed that machines could be created that would mimic the processes of the human brain. He acknowledged the difficulty people would have accepting a machine to rival their own intelligence, a problem that still plagues artificial intelligence today.

He likened new technology devices such as cameras and microphones to parts of the human body and his views often landed him in heated debates with other scientists. Turing believed an intelligent machine could be created by following the blueprints of the human brain. He wrote a paper in 1950 describing what is now known as the Turing Test.

The test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an intelligent machine. He believed that if computer's answers could not be distinguished from those of the person after a reasonable amount of time, the machine was somewhat intelligent. This test has become a standard measure of the artificial intelligence community. Sadly he committed suicide on 7th June 1954

Now an appeal has been launched to raise £50,000 for a bronze statue of him - but so far, computer companies have failed to give not even a single penny.

The School of Mathematics is housed in the Alan Turing Building Manchester University.

The Alan Turing Building, completed in 2007, For Books on Alan Turing Click Here

The First Home Computer

In April 1982 a small British company, led by Sir Clive Sinclair, launched the ZX Spectrum computer and sparked a revolution.

The small, black computer with iconic rubber keys ignited the home computer age in the UK and beyond, led to an explosion in computer manufacturing and developed software programming talent that is still in evidence today.

The computer was the brainchild of British technology entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair who also, with the Sinclair Cambridge, developed one of the first cheap and slim pocket calculators in 1972.

The Spectrum was the third home computer to be released by Sinclair - following the ZX80 and ZX81 - but was the first aimed squarely at the home.

The machine came in two models - £125 for a 16KB machine and £175 for a 48KB machine, making it one of the first affordable machines.

Home-computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair  sold the marketing and merchandising rights to his inventions for £5m to computing rival Amstrad.

                                                                                                                                    Sir Clive Sinclair

The company, owned and run by Alan Sugar, revolutionised the home computer market in the UK by producing affordable "no-frills" machines.

When Amstrad's share price fell in the 1990s recession, Mr Sugar reorganised the company and launched a new generation of consumer products, such as the e-mail enabled phone.

He was knighted in 1999 and a year later his company was the first to have full approval from TV satellite company BSkyB for the Amstrad digital set-top box.

To day we have numberless of different makes and models flooding the market in the high street

Although the computers that we will be buying next year have yet to be built, Intel already knows exactly what they will be capable of doing.

Top of the list is the building of wireless network technologies so home computers can act as a co-ordinating hub for all electronics in a home.

Next year's machines are expected to be much better at carrying out more than one complicated task at a time and much easier to upgrade and swap parts in and out.

Many of us carry three or four digital devices with us, according to Simon Moore of Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory, but soon that figure will be in the hundreds.

"They'll be woven into our clothing as identification markers during manufacture," he said.

"They might tell your washing machine what cycle to use, or monitor bio-signs to alert us to impending illness."

Those predictions came at the launch of the Cambridge-MIT Institute's Pervasive Computing initiative (CMI).

It is part of a transatlantic collaboration between information scientists and engineers at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

The Worlds Most Advanced Computer:  The Earth Simulator

Japanese supercomputer simulates Earth

A new Japanese supercomputer costing hundreds of millions of dollars was switched on this month and immediately outclassed its nearest rival.

Before its launch, all of the top six supercomputers in the world were in the US.

The new machine, called the Earth Simulator, is five times as fast as the best of these and is being used by the Japan Marine Science and Technology Centre to make predictions about the future of the Earth's climate and its crust.

A German supercomputer expert says it is likely to remain the world's fastest supercomputer for at least two years.

Rivals outclassed by ( The Earth Simulator

The previous record holder, ASCI White at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the US, was built by IBM and is used to simulate nuclear weapons explosions.

The performance of giant computers like these is judged by the number of floating point operations or Flops - calculations involving non whole numbers - they can carry out every second.

The Earth Simulator is capable of 35 teraflops, or 35 million million calculations per second.

The US is poised to push Japan off the top of the supercomputing chart with IBM's prototype Blue Gene/L machine.

Blue Gene/L, the fastest supercomputer in the world, has broken its own speed record, reaching 135.5 teraflops - 135.5 trillion calculations a second.

That is double the speed it clocked up to take it to the number one spot in the Top 500 supercomputer league.

The IBM Blue Gene machine that achieved the new mark is being assembled for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy (DOE) lab.

It did 70.72 teraflops last year to beat Japan's NEC Earth Simulator. The next generation of computers  are going to be much more advance then what we see today, mind reading and thought control, the ability to read your mind and access your passed memories , are just some of the features they will have.

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TO BE CONTINUED. . .

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