Rajan Sarma | Wednesday, 09 September 2020, 16:59 IST
The history of computers has been chronicled and interpreted in many different ways by many different authors. There is no specific answer to the questio n – Who invented the first computer? The best that could be done is to explore the history.
The credit for making the first mechanical computers goes to Charles Babbage way back in 1822. His machines were capable of computing several sets of numbers and make hard copies out of it, but it does not resemble anything like what we would call a computer today.
During the troubled times of World War II, there was a carefully guarded German machine named Enigma invented by German engineer Arthur Scerbius. In WWII, Enigma was used to encrypt all German military information. The German codes made by Enigma was considered impossible to crack.
Alan Turing: The Man Who Changed History
During the times when the Nazi army was ravaging half of Europe, a PHD Graduate in Mathematics from the Cambridge University was working part-time for the Government of Britain – his task, decode the Enigma. Alan and his team of British scientists painstakingly worked on decoding, calculating the endless Enigma codes within a secret government facility for almost two years. After two years, Alan Turing’s machine finally deciphered the first Enigma code back on July 9th 1941. The Turning machine finally broke the Enigma code and arguably changed the tide of the war as the allied forces were able to track down every German move on the battlefield henceforth.
Alan Turning named his machine Cristopher, inspired by his dead childhood friend. According to many, the Alan Turing Machine was the first-ever computer. The machine was able to print symbols on paper tape in a manner that emulated a person following a series of logical instructions. With this technique, Alan and his team of scientists were able to decode 159 Quintillion codes every day!
The Great Leap Towards Prosperity
The Turing Machine – created due to war necessities ushered in a new era for the development of computers. In 1948, the first computer to electronically store and execute a programme was developed at Manchester. It was designed by Fredric Williams, and popularly known as the Manchester Baby.
Back in 1953, today’s tech behemoth IBM publicly introduced the 701 – the first-ever commercial scientific computer.
In 1955, MIT introduced the Whirlwind Machine – the first-ever digital computer with RAM. The decade of the 1960s saw the development of the first-ever mass-market computers. In 1964, Hewlett Packard introduced the HP 9100A, considered to be the first desktop computer.
Up until the 1970s, computers were massive. It needed to be stored in entire rooms! By 1975, the first Personal Computers (PCs) were introduced. Two computers are claiming the title of the first-ever PC – the Altair 8800 and the KENBAK-1.
Steve Wozniak introduced the first-ever computer to have some faint resemblance of today’s systems in 1976. Named as Apple 1, the computer contained a 6502 8-bit processor and 4 kb of memory, which was expandable to 8 or 48 kb using expansion cards. It had a fully assembled circuit board, including a power supply, a keyboard, a display and a case.
The next couple of decades witnessed the PC getting even more personalized and smaller with many players coming up with their own version of a PC. The commercialization of personal computers reached its peak in the early 2000s, with many forms of personal devices – Laptops, PC, Tablets, and Smartphones. The evolution of computers from Enigma and Christopher to today’s Laptops and Smartphones is a remarkable one indeed.
Quantum Super Computers: Dawn of a New Age
With the onset of the 2020 decade, we are again entering into a new age for the development of computers. We have just stepped into the new domain of Quantum computing. Supercomputers are as big as a room like it used to be in the early stages of the development of the first computer. But this time for entirely different reasons, and altogether different laws of physics. The benefits that AI-powered Quantum Supercomputers are going to bring forth are immense, beyond comprehension.
At present, the world’s fastest supercomputer is named Fugaku, installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan. The Fugaku supercomputer can run applications that can assist drug discovery, simulate natural disasters, climate forecasting, and it can also be used for new material development.
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