History of Computer (part-I)

The computer has long history that begun near about 2000 years ago. People have been using mechanical devices to aid calculation for thousands of years, for example, the abacus probably existed in Babylonia about 3000 B.C.E. The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. In 1617 an Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition. In 1641 the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal built a mechanical adding machine. It is considered as first mechanical calculator. He named it Pascaline. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also came up with a machine for doing calculations. It could do much more than Pascaline. Leibniz has another important contribution to computing. He was the man who invented binary code, a way of representing any decimal number using only the two digits zero and one. In France(1801), Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a Power Loom that used wooden slat "punch cards" to make patterns on the loom.

Neither the abacus, nor the mechanical calculators constructed by Pascal and Leibniz really qualified as computers. In 19th century, English mathematician and professor name Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine which was the basic framework of the computers of today. This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines. The analytical engine had expandable memory, an arithmetic unit, and logic processing capabilities able to interpret a programming language with loops and conditional branching. Babbage is also considered as 'Father of Computer'. Babbage was more fortunate in receiving help from Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. An enthusiastic mathematician, she helped to refine Babbage's ideas for making his machine programmable -- and this is why she is still, sometimes, referred to as the world's first computer programmer.American statistician Herman Hollerith built one of the world's first practical calculating machines, which he called a tabulator, to help compile census data in 1890. In 1936, Alan Turing wrote a mathematical paper called 'On computable numbers' and there he presented the notion of a universal machine, later called the Turing machine, capable of computing anything that is computable.  He proved that some such machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation The central concept of the modern computer was based on his ideas.