HISTORY OF COMPUTERS

Nothing has changed the world around us the way digital technology and computers have. Computers have entered even, aspect of our life and the environment around us. The origin of computers can be traced back to thousands of years. Though different forms of computers were in existence for centuries, the real transformation happened with elec-tronic or digital computers. The development of electronic computer started during the Second World War. In 1911 German engineer Konrad Zuse had developed a computer called Z3 CO design airplanes and missiles. In 1943, the British developed a computer called Colossus for cryptanalysis to decode encrypted messages transacted by Germans. With a team of engineers in 1944, Howard II. Aiken developed the Harvard-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator Mark 1, or Mark I for short. This is consid-ered as the early general-purpose computer. In 1945 John von Neumann introduced the concept of stored program. Another general-purpose computer development spurred by the War was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, better known as ENIAC, developed by John Presper Eckert and John W Mauchly in 1946. In 1917, the invention of the transistor by John Bardeen; Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Labs changed the development scenario of digital computers. The transistor replaced the large, energy-hungry vacuum tube in first generation computers. Jack Kilby, an engi-neer with Texas Instruments, developed the integrated circuit (IC; in 1958. IC combined all the essential electronic components (inductor, resistor, capacitor etc.) onto a small sil-icon disc, which was made from quartz. By the 1980s, very large scale integration (VLSI:: squeezed hundreds of thousands of components onto a chip. VLSI led the development Of third generation computers. All these early computers contained all the components we find today in any modem day computers like printers, persistent storage, memory, operating systems and stored programs. However, one aspect of modem-day computers was missing in these machines-that was the networking aspect of today's computers.