History

History of the Computer, Beginning to 1979 by Nick Murphy 1936 - Konrad Zuse – He invented the Z1 Computer. This was the first freely programmable computer. Despite certain mechanical engineering problems it had all the basic ingredients of modern machines, using the binary system and today's standard separation of storage and control.

Eniac 1 – 1946 - John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly - The military sponsored the their research. They needed a calculating device for writing artillery tables. Besides its speed, the most remarkable thing about ENIAC was its size and complexity.

1947 - Mark II - Howard Aiken & Grace Hopper - Aiken got an idea to build a machine capable of solving nonlinear equations, which current machines, such as the Differential Analyzer, couldn’t do. It was completely mechanical with 750, 000 parts and hundred of miles of wiring. It contained 9 bytes of memory.

1954 – John Backus and IBM - Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational physics, and computational chemistry. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of High-performance computing and programs to benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers are written in Fortran.

1960’s – The Mouse – Douglas Engelbert - Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse in the 60’s but it wasn’t commercially used until the 80’s. It was nicknamed the mouse because the cord came out the end. The mouse was popularized by its inclusion with Apple Macintosh. Today a mouse is one of the key components to the computer to make it function.

1976 – Steve Wozniak- The Apple 1 was an early PC (personal computer). They were designed and hand built by Steve Wozniak. It was the first fully assembled PC with 30 chips. The Apple I's built-in computer terminal circuitry was distinctive. All one needed was a keyboard and an inexpensive video monitor.

1979 - Seymour Rubenstein & Rob Barnaby - WordStar was a word processor application, published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS, that enjoyed a dominant market share during the early to mid-1980s. Although Seymour I. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program; starting with WordStar 4.0, the program was built on new code written principally by Peter Mierau.