When did the first computer appear?

Computers, without which our lives are impossible, actually appeared not so long ago. Not only did the older generation not use computers during their studies at schools and institutes, but they usually had no idea what they were. The era of computers and even electronic computers, as we used to call the first computers, came into our lives relatively recently. Although their most distant predecessor, the abacus, appeared in ancient Babylon 3000 years before Christ.

The first person to invent the first digital computer was Blaise Pascal. In 1642, he presented the Pascaline, the first mechanical digital computing device. The prototype device summed and counted five-digit decimal numbers. Pascal made more than ten such computers, and the last models operated with numbers with eight decimal places. It all started with this discovery…

Who invented the first electronic computer and when?

In 1942, the American physicist John Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry designed and began assembling the first electronic computer. The work was not completed, but it greatly influenced the creator of the first electronic computer, ENIAC. The person who invented the ENIAC computer, the first electronic digital computer, was John Mockley, an American physicist and engineer. John Mockley summarized the basic principles of building a computer based on his experience in developing machines, and in 1946 the world was presented with a real ENIAC electronic computer.

So the question of what year the computer was created, where the first computer was created, and who created the first computer can be answered in different ways. If we are talking about the first computer in general (in this case, a mechanical one), then the creator of such a computer can be considered Konrad Zuse, and the country in which the first computer was invented can be considered Germany. If we consider the first computer to be an electronic computer, then it will be ENIAC, the inventor, respectively, is John Mockley, and the country is the United States.

The first computers were still far from the ones we use today – personal computers. They were huge, occupied a large area comparable to that of a multi-room apartment, and weighed several tens of tons! Personal computers (PCs) appeared much later.

Who created the first personal computer?

The creation of the first personal computers became possible only in the 1970s. Some people began to assemble computers at home for research purposes, as there were practically no useful applications for computers at home. And in 1975, the first personal computer Altair 8800 appeared, which became the first commercially successful PC. The creator of the first personal computer was an American engineer Henry Edward Roberts, who was also the founder and president of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, which started producing the first PC. The Altair 8800 was the “boss” of the boom in personal computing.

The first personal computers, and even the computers of the early 90s, were many orders of magnitude weaker than modern ones. Suffice it to say that the memory capacity of a modern, not-so-cool “flash drive” is comparable to the entire disk memory of several thousand (!!!) personal computers of the early 90s. And so it is with all other indicators. The fantastic breakthrough in the performance of modern personal computers in the 2000s is primarily due to the development of new technologies in the field of electronics and nanotechnology.