History of computers

Hello, thank you for watching my blog.

I will write about computers and introduce interesting things in this blog.

First blogging theme is “History”.

Do you know the origin of computers?

Generally speaking, it is “ENIAC(1946)” which was invented by John William Mauchly and John Presper Eckert. ENIAC contained eighty thousand vacuum tubes, weight is thirty ton and the power consumption was 150kW. But there was many problems. The life expectancy of the vacuum tube of was 2000 hours in those days. Therefore, if it calculates simply, a vacuum tube will break down in 6 minutes once. Since it was useless, Eckert made the filament of a vacuum tube turn on voltage lower than usual in order to improve reliability. The failure rate of ENIAC was lowness called two or three vacuums tube per week.

I introduce ENIAC is the first computer, but there was the computer appeared earlier than ENIAC. It is “ABC(1942)” which invented by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Edward Berry. ABC contained three hundred vacuum tubes and the size was as large as a desk. And ABC adopted the binary number and the logic circuit, and had memory similar to DRAM (dynamic random access memory). It is a root of DRAM which is the memory which we are using for the personal computer.  But the memory was SAM (sequential access memory) correctly because the memory was a rotating drum.

There is one more computer called the first computer. It is “Colossus(1943)” was developed in order to use for World War Ⅱ in UK. Colossus used two thousand five hundred vacuum tubes and the power consumption was 4,5kW. Colossus gave the Allied Forces precious information in Normandy Landings in 1944. However, since Colossus was developed by military purposes, it was carried out in profound secrecy.

The modern computer is called the Neumman type. EDASC is the first computer which was invented by Maurice Vincent Wilkes (Cambridge University) in 1949. The name of EDSAC is an abbreviation of "Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator". EDSAC had delay strage. The such type memory which reads and writes continuous data one by one is called sequential access memory. EDSAC contained three thousand vacuum tubes and the power consumption was 12kW. The power consumption of EDSAC was 1/10 less than of ENIAC.

Finally I would like to introduce WWW (world wide web). It is one of the most typical applications of the Internet in an E-mail in an information inspection system.  Nowadays, it is thanks to World Wide Web that we can browse a web page on the Internet. WWW was developed by CERN (European center for nuclear research) in 1989. The greatest feature of WWW is being able to embed the information for referring to other documents into a document. At the WWW server which offers the information on a web page, the file written in a language called HTML is saved, and it can see now freely from the outside. WWW was set to one of the factors through which the Internet spreads by leaps and bounds.