Computers In Society :: essays research papers

Computers in SocietyMy report is on the development of the computer for personal use by home consumers and their impact on society. Computers were existence developed as early as the 1800s and were more of a machine than a computer. The first digital computer that worked electronically was build by Clifford Berry and Dr. John V. Atanasoff in the late 30s and early 40s. The first computer as we know it was designed by Howard Aiken and built by IBM in 1944. This first computer was called the Mark I and was eight feet high and over fifty five feet long. It was made of steel and glass and was in truth unreliable and extremely noisy. The beginning of the commercial computer age was in June of 1951. This was when the UNIVAC (universal automatic computer) was delivered to a client. The client was the U.S. bureau of the census and was to be used for scheming the previous years census. This was the first time that a computer had been built for a business application rather than for the us e of the military or for scientific or engineering use. These first computers came to be known as the first generation computers and used nullity tubes, which were electronic tubes about the size of light bulbs as the internal computer components. However, due to the fact that literally thousands of these tubes were required, they generated enormous amounts of heat that caused many problems in the temperature regulation and climate control inside these computers. In summation every tube had to be working simultaneously in order for the computer to function and due to the short tube life (one failed every peer of hours) the computer operators didnt know if the problem was due to a programming error or the machine itself. These first generation computers also used a language called machine language that used numbers instead of todays languages that are more like English. In 1948 terce Bell lab engineers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, developed the transistor, which was a small device that transfers electric signals across a resistor. The transistor would replace the vacuum tube that was being used in computers. The engineers later received the Nobel Prize for their invention. The transistor revolutionized the computer industry, because they were much smaller than vacuum tubes and had legion(predicate) advantages as well. They didnt require any warm up time, they consumed less energy, were faster, and more reliable.