Main articles: History of computing and History of computing hardware

For a chronological guide, see Timeline of computing.

Pre-20th century

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly
using one-to-one correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device
was most likely a form of tally stick. Later record keeping aids throughout the
Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented
counts of items, likely livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay
containers.[a][4] The use of counting rods is one example.

The Chinese suanpan (算盘). The number represented on this abacus is

6,302,715,408.

The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was
developed from devices used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BCE. Since then,
many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented. In a
medieval European counting house, a checkered cloth would be placed on a
table, and markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid
to calculating sums of money.[5]

The Antikythera mechanism, dating back to ancient Greece circa 150–100

BCE, is an early analog computing device.

The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest known mechanical

analog computer, according to Derek J. De Solla Price.[6] It was designed to
calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera
wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and
has been dated to approximately c. 100 BCE. Devices of comparable
complexity to the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until the
fourteenth century.[7]
Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for
astronomical and navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented
by Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in the early 11th century.[8] The astrolabe was
invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1 st or 2nd centuries BCE and is
often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra,
the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out
several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe
incorporating a mechanical calendar computer[9][10] and gear-wheels was
invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan, Persia in 1235.[11] Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī
invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe,[12] an
early fixed-wired knowledge processing machine[13] with a gear train and
gear-wheels,[14] c. 1000 AD.

The sector, a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion,

trigonometry, multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as
squares and cube roots, was developed in the late 16 th century and found
application in gunnery, surveying and navigation.

The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed

figure by tracing over it with a mechanical linkage.

A slide rule

The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, by the English clergyman
William Oughtred, shortly after the publication of the concept of the
logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and
division. As slide rule development progressed, added scales provided
reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, as well as
transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular and
hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions. Slide rules with special scales
are still used for quick performance of routine calculations, such as the E6B
circular slide rule used for time and distance calculations on light aircraft.

In the 1770s, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss watchmaker, built a mechanical doll

(automaton) that could write holding a quill pen. By switching the number
and order of its internal wheels different letters, and hence different
messages, could be produced. In effect, it could be mechanically
“programmed” to read instructions. Along with two other complex machines,
the doll is at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and still
operates.[15]

In 1831–1835, mathematician and engineer Giovanni Plana devised a

Perpetual Calendar machine, which, through a system of pulleys and
cylinders and over, could predict the perpetual calendar for every year from
0 CE (that is, 1 BCE) to 4000 CE, keeping track of leap years and varying day
length. The tide-predicting machine invented by the Scottish scientist Sir
William Thomson in 1872 was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters.
It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted
tide levels for a set period at a particular location.

The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve

differential equations by integration, used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to
perform the integration. In 1876, Sir William Thomson had already discussed
the possible construction of such calculators, but he had been stymied by
the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators.[16] In a differential
analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator,
or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed
these machines to work. Starting in the 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others
developed mechanical differential analyzers.

In the 1890s, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo began to

develop a series of advanced analog machines that could solve real and
complex roots of polynomials,[17][18][19][20] which were published in 1901
by the Paris Academy of Sciences.[21]

First computer

Charles Babbage
(A diagram of a portion of Babbage’s Difference engine)

The Difference Engine Number 2 at the Intellectual Ventures laboratory in

Seattle

Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath, originated

the concept of a programmable computer. Considered the “father of the
computer”,[22] he conceptualized and invented the first mechanical
computer in the early 19th century.

After working on his difference engine he announced his invention in 1822, in

a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society, titled “Note on the application of
machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables”,[23]
he also designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that
a much more general design, an analytical engine, was possible. The input of
programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards, a
method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the
Jacquard loom. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter
and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to
be read in later. The engine would incorporate an arithmetic logic unit,
control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated
memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that
could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.[24][25]

The machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his
machine had to be made by hand – this was a major problem for a device
with thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was dissolved with the
decision of the British Government to cease funding. Babbage’s failure to
complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to political and
financial difficulties as well as his desire to develop an increasingly
sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than anyone else could
follow. Nevertheless, his son, Henry Babbage, completed a simplified version
of the analytical engine’s computing unit (the mill) in 1888. He gave a
successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906.

Electromechanical calculating machine

Electro-mechanical calculator (1920) by Leonardo Torres Quevedo.

In his work Essays on Automatics published in 1914, Leonardo Torres

Quevedo wrote a brief history of Babbage’s efforts at constructing a
mechanical Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. The paper contains a
design of a machine capable to calculate formulas like

( FORMULA

, for a sequence of sets of values. The whole machine was to be controlled by

a read-only program, which was complete with provisions for conditional
branching. He also introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic.[26][27]
[28] In 1920, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the
arithmometer, Torres presented in Paris the Electromechanical Arithmometer,
which allowed a user to input arithmetic problems through a keyboard, and
computed and printed the results,[29][30][31][32] demonstrating the
feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine.[33]

Analog computers

Main article: Analog computer

Sir William Thomson’s third tide-predicting machine design, 1879–81

During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs
were met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a
direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for
computation. However, these were not programmable and generally lacked
the versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers.[34] The first
modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir
William Thomson (later to become Lord Kelvin) in 1872. The differential
analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential
equations by integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was
conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson, the elder brother of the more
famous Sir William Thomson.[16]

The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the
differential analyzer, built by H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MIT starting
in 1927. This built on the mechanical integrators of James Thomson and the
torque amplifiers invented by H. W. Nieman. A dozen of these devices were
built before their obsolescence became obvious. By the 1950s, the success
of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog
computing machines, but analog computers remained in use during the
1950s in some specialized applications such as education (slide rule) and
aircraft (control systems).

Digital computers

Electromechanical

By 1938, the United States Navy had developed an electromechanical analog

computer small enough to use aboard a submarine. This was the Torpedo
Data Computer, which used trigonometry to solve the problem of firing a
torpedo at a moving target. During World War II similar devices were
developed in other countries as well.

Replica of Konrad Zuse’s Z3, the first fully automatic, digital

(electromechanical) computer

Early digital computers were electromechanical; electric switches drove

mechanical relays to perform the calculation. These devices had a low
operating speed and were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric
computers, originally using vacuum tubes. The Z2, created by German
engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939 in Berlin, was one of the earliest examples of
an electromechanical relay computer.[35]
Konrad Zuse, inventor of the modern computer[36][37]

In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3, the world’s first
working electromechanical programmable, fully automatic digital computer.
[38][39] The Z3 was built with 2000 relays, implementing a 22 bit word
length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz.[40] Program
code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of
memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern
machines in some respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating-
point numbers. Rather than the harder-to-implement decimal system (used
in Charles Babbage’s earlier design), using a binary system meant that
Zuse’s machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the
technologies available at that time.[41] The Z3 was not itself a universal
computer but could be extended to be Turing complete.[42][43]

Zuse’s next computer, the Z4, became the world’s first commercial
computer; after initial delay due to the Second World War, it was completed
in 1950 and delivered to the ETH Zurich.[44] The computer was
manufactured by Zuse’s own company, Zuse KG, which was founded in 1941
as the first company with the sole purpose of developing computers in Berlin.
[44]

Vacuum tubes and digital electronic circuits

Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and

electromechanical equivalents, at the same time that digital calculation
replaced analog. The engineer Tommy Flowers, working at the Post Office
Research Station in London in the 1930s, began to explore the possible use
of electronics for the telephone exchange. Experimental equipment that he
built in 1934 went into operation five years later, converting a portion of the
telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system,
using thousands of vacuum tubes.[34] In the US, John Vincent Atanasoff and
Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and tested the Atanasoff–
Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942,[45] the first “automatic electronic digital
computer”.[46] This design was also all-electronic and used about 300
vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for
memory.[47]

Colossus, the first electronic digital programmable computing device, was

used to break German ciphers during World War II. It is seen here in use at
Bletchley Park in 1943.

During World War II, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park achieved a
number of successes at breaking encrypted German military
communications. The German encryption machine, Enigma, was first
attacked with the help of the electro-mechanical bombes which were often
run by women.[48][49] To crack the more sophisticated German Lorenz SZ
40/42 machine, used for high-level Army communications, Max Newman and
his colleagues commissioned Flowers to build the Colossus.[47] He spent
eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building the first
Colossus.[50] After a functional test in December 1943, Colossus was
shipped to Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 18 January 1944[51]
and attacked its first message on 5 February.[47]

Colossus was the world’s first electronic digital programmable computer.[34]

It used a large number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and
was capable of being configured to perform a variety of boolean logical
operations on its data, but it was not Turing-complete. Nine Mk II Colossi
were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total).
Colossus Mark I contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Mark II with
2,400 valves, was both five times faster and simpler to operate than Mark I,
greatly speeding the decoding process.[52][53]

ENIAC was the first electronic, Turing-complete device, and performed

ballistics trajectory calculations for the United States Army.

The ENIAC[54] (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first
electronic programmable computer built in the U.S. Although the ENIAC was
similar to the Colossus, it was much faster, more flexible, and it was Turing-
complete. Like the Colossus, a “program” on the ENIAC was defined by the
states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored program
electronic machines that came later. Once a program was written, it had to
be mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and
switches. The programmers of the ENIAC were six women, often known
collectively as the “ENIAC girls”.[55][56]

It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed

for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000 times a second, a
thousand times faster than any other machine. It also had modules to
multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was limited to 20
words (about 80 bytes). Built under the direction of John Mauchly and J.
Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC’s development and
construction lasted from 1943 to full operation at the end of 1945. The
machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, using 200 kilowatts of electric power
and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of
thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors.[57]

Modern computers

Concept of modern computer

The principle of the modern computer was proposed by Alan Turing in his
seminal 1936 paper,[58] On Computable Numbers. Turing proposed a simple
device that he called “Universal Computing machine” and that is now known
as a universal Turing machine. He proved that such a machine is capable of
computing anything that is computable by executing instructions (program)
stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. The fundamental
concept of Turing’s design is the stored program, where all the instructions
for computing are stored in memory. Von Neumann acknowledged that the
central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper.[59] Turing
machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation.
Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, modern
computers are said to be Turing-complete, which is to say, they have
algorithm execution capability equivalent to a universal Turing machine.

Stored programs

Main article: Stored-program computer

A section of the reconstructed Manchester Baby, the first electronic stored-
program computer

Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing its function

required the re-wiring and re-structuring of the machine.[47] With the
proposal of the stored-program computer this changed. A stored-program
computer includes by design an instruction set and can store in memory a
set of instructions (a program) that details the computation. The theoretical
basis for the stored-program computer was laid out by Alan Turing in his
1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory and
began work on developing an electronic stored-program digital computer. His
1945 report “Proposed Electronic Calculator” was the first specification for
such a device. John von Neumann at the University of Pennsylvania also
circulated his First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC in 1945.[34]

The Manchester Baby was the world’s first stored-program computer. It was
built at the University of Manchester in England by Frederic C. Williams, Tom
Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.[60] It was
designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first random-access digital
storage device.[61] Although the computer was described as “small and
primitive” by a 1998 retrospective, it was the first working machine to
contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer.[62] As
soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project
began at the university to develop it into a practically useful computer, the
Manchester Mark 1.

The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the
world’s first commercially available general-purpose computer.[63] Built by
Ferranti, it was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951.
At least seven of these later machines were delivered between 1953 and
1957, one of them to Shell labs in Amsterdam.[64] In October 1947 the
directors of British catering company J. Lyons & Company decided to take an
active role in promoting the commercial development of computers. Lyons’s
LEO I computer, modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC of 1949, became
operational in April 1951[65] and ran the world’s first routine office computer
job.
Transistors

Main articles: Transistor and History of the transistor

Further information: Transistor computer and MOSFET

Bipolar junction transistor (BJT)

The concept of a field-effect transistor was proposed by Julius Edgar

Lilienfeld in 1925. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, while working under
William Shockley at Bell Labs, built the first working transistor, the point-
contact transistor, in 1947, which was followed by Shockley’s bipolar junction
transistor in 1948.[66][67] From 1955 onwards, transistors replaced vacuum
tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the “second generation” of
computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages:
they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less
heat. Junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and
had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain
tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space.
However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were
difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, which limited them to a
number of specialized applications.[68]

At the University of Manchester, a team under the leadership of Tom Kilburn

designed and built a machine using the newly developed transistors instead
of valves.[69] Their first transistorized computer and the first in the world,
was operational by 1953, and a second version was completed there in April
1955. However, the machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz
clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum
memory, so it was not the first completely transistorized computer. That
distinction goes to the Harwell CADET of 1955,[70] built by the electronics
division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.[70][71]
MOSFET (MOS transistor), showing gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain
(D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer
(pink).

The metal–oxide–silicon field-effect transistor (MOSFET), also known as the

MOS transistor, The MOSFET invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960,
[72][73][74][75][76][77] It was the first truly compact transistor that could
be miniaturized and mass-produced for a wide range of uses.[68] With its
high scalability,[78] and much lower power consumption and higher density
than bipolar junction transistors,[79] the MOSFET made it possible to build
high-density integrated circuits.[80][81] In addition to data processing, it also
enabled the practical use of MOS transistors as memory cell storage
elements, leading to the development of MOS semiconductor memory, which
replaced earlier magnetic-core memory in computers. The MOSFET led to the
microcomputer revolution,[82] and became the driving force behind the
computer revolution.[83][84] The MOSFET is the most widely used transistor
in computers,[85][86] and is the fundamental building block of digital
electronics.[87]

Integrated circuits

Main articles: Integrated circuit and Invention of the integrated circuit

Further information: Planar process and Microprocessor

Integrated circuits are typically packaged in plastic, metal, or ceramic cases

to protect the IC from damage and for ease of assembly.

The next great advance in computing power came with the advent of the
integrated circuit (IC). The idea of the integrated circuit was first conceived
by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the Ministry
of Defence, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. Dummer presented the first public
description of an integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality
Electronic Components in Washington, D.C., on 7 May 1952.[88]

The first working ICs were invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and
Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor.[89] Kilby recorded his initial ideas
concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the
first working integrated example on 12 September 1958.[90] In his patent
application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as “a body of
semiconductor material ... wherein all the components of the electronic
circuit are completely integrated”.[91][92] However, Kilby’s invention was a
hybrid integrated circuit (hybrid IC), rather than a monolithic integrated
circuit (IC) chip.[93] Kilby’s IC had external wire connections, which made it
difficult to mass-produce.[94]

Noyce also came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year
later than Kilby.[95] Noyce’s invention was the first true monolithic IC chip.
[96][94] His chip solved many practical problems that Kilby’s had not.
Produced at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was made of silicon, whereas Kilby’s
chip was made of germanium. Noyce’s monolithic IC was fabricated using the
planar process, developed by his colleague Jean Hoerni in early 1959. In turn,
the planar process was based on Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick work on
semiconductor surface passivation by silicon dioxide.[97][98][99][100][101]
[102]

Modern monolithic ICs are predominantly MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor)

integrated circuits, built from MOSFETs (MOS transistors).[103] The earliest
experimental MOS IC to be fabricated was a 16-transistor chip built by Fred
Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962.[104] General Microelectronics
later introduced the first commercial MOS IC in 1964,[105] developed by
Robert Norman.[104] Following the development of the self-aligned gate
(silicon-gate) MOS transistor by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace
at Bell Labs in 1967, the first silicon-gate MOS IC with self-aligned gates was
developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968.[106] The
MOSFET has since become the most critical device component in modern
ICs.[103]

Die photograph of a MOS 6502, an early 1970s microprocessor integrating

3500 transistors on a single chip

The development of the MOS integrated circuit led to the invention of the
microprocessor,[107][108] and heralded an explosion in the commercial and
personal use of computers. While the subject of exactly which device was the
first microprocessor is contentious, partly due to lack of agreement on the
exact definition of the term “microprocessor”, it is largely undisputed that
the first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004,[109] designed and
realized by Federico Faggin with his silicon-gate MOS IC technology,[107]
along with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel.[b][111] In
the early 1970s, MOS IC technology enabled the integration of more than
10,000 transistors on a single chip.[81]

System on a Chip (SoCs) are complete computers on a microchip (or chip)

the size of a coin.[112] They may or may not have integrated RAM and flash
memory. If not integrated, the RAM is usually placed directly above (known
as Package on package) or below (on the opposite side of the circuit board)
the SoC, and the flash memory is usually placed right next to the SoC, this all
done to improve data transfer speeds, as the data signals do not have to
travel long distances. Since ENIAC in 1945, computers have advanced
enormously, with modern SoCs (Such as the Snapdragon 865) being the size
of a coin while also being hundreds of thousands of times more powerful
than ENIAC, integrating billions of transistors, and consuming only a few
watts of power.

Mobile computers

The first mobile computers were heavy and ran from mains power. The 50 lb
(23 kg) IBM 5100 was an early example. Later portables such as the Osborne
1 and Compaq Portable were considerably lighter but still needed to be
plugged in. The first laptops, such as the Grid Compass, removed this
requirement by incorporating batteries – and with the continued
miniaturization of computing resources and advancements in portable
battery life, portable computers grew in popularity in the 2000s.[113] The
same developments allowed manufacturers to integrate computing
resources into cellular mobile phones by the early 2000s.

These smartphones and tablets run on a variety of operating systems and

recently became the dominant computing device on the market.[114] These
are powered by System on a Chip (SoCs), which are complete computers on
a microchip the size of a coin.[112]