History of The ComputerBy Rehaan Machhi

Intro into The ComputerNow we all of the computer. It basically runs our life and helps do more tasks efficiently. This machine is one of the bases of modern technology. If I asked the average person about the history of a computer they would probably bring up only the big names, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. While these people revolutionized our world today, there are a lot of other very important people we don’t know about who revolutionized computing today. We are going to take a look at what they all did to make the computer the greatest machine on the planet.

The Computer• In 1939 Hewlett and Packard was founded. David Packard and Bill

Hewlett created the HP 200A Audio Oscillator. This marvelous piece of equipment rapidly became a popular piece of test equipment for engineers.

• In 1948 IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the company´s Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.

Alan Turing• Found dead at age 42• Published a seminal paper, “On Computable

Numbers,” in 1936.• Posed a significant question about judging

“human intelligence” and programming and working on the design of several computers during the course of his career.

• He proved to be instrumental in code-breaking efforts during World War 2. His application of logic to that realm would emerge even more significantly in his development of the concept of a “universal machine.”

Hard Disks• This is n essential part of the computer revolution,

allowing fast, random access to large amounts of data.

• BM announced its most successful mainframe hard disk (what IBM called a “Direct Access Storage Device (DASD)” in June of 1980, actually shipping units the following year.

• The 3380 came in six models initially (later growing to many more) and price at time of introduction ranged from $81,000 to $142,200. The base model stored 2.5 GB of data, later models extended this to 20GB.

• One of IBMs most successful products of all time.

Speak and Spell• Texas Instruments Inc. introduced Speak & Spell, a

talking learning aid for ages 7 and up. Its debut marked the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon.

• Speak & Spell utilized linear predictive coding to formulate a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample based on previous input.

• It transformed digital information processed through a filter into synthetic speech and could store more than 100 seconds of linguistic sounds.