Rome wasn't built in a day, nor was the computer! The computer as we know today has a long history.
The first calculator
One of the first computing machines known is the Abacus. It was used in Europe as well as Asia around the 15th century.
Blaise Pascal
In 1642, Blaise Pascal invented the Pascaline that was a mechanical calculator.
Almost 30 years later, Gottfried Von Leibniz took things a step further. He called it the Stepped Reconer. Pascal's machine could now do multiplications, divisions and find square roots.
Charles Babbage
The early 1800s, Charles Babbage made history by building The Difference Engine.
The world now had a machine that mechanised a whole series of complex calculations and provided an output. He is called the Father of the Computers.
One of the most remarkable things is that this machine had a memory. Here data could be held temporarily for later usage.
Alan Turing
The Turing Machine was the first description of the modern day computer.
Built in 1936, it consisted of a long magnetic tape that had a combination of symbols, a head that could read and write symbols to the tape, and a set of simple instructions that directed the head to read and change the symbols on the tape.
A computer we would recognize today works on the same theory as the Turing Machine but is much more complex.
However, whether we talk of the simple computers built by Babbage and Turing or the complex computer you are reading, the idea remains the same. Accept in the input, process it and then deliver a result.
The first calculator
One of the first computing machines known is the Abacus. It was used in Europe as well as Asia around the 15th century.
Blaise Pascal
In 1642, Blaise Pascal invented the Pascaline that was a mechanical calculator.
Almost 30 years later, Gottfried Von Leibniz took things a step further. He called it the Stepped Reconer. Pascal's machine could now do multiplications, divisions and find square roots.
Charles Babbage
The early 1800s, Charles Babbage made history by building The Difference Engine.
The world now had a machine that mechanised a whole series of complex calculations and provided an output. He is called the Father of the Computers.
One of the most remarkable things is that this machine had a memory. Here data could be held temporarily for later usage.
Alan Turing
The Turing Machine was the first description of the modern day computer.
Built in 1936, it consisted of a long magnetic tape that had a combination of symbols, a head that could read and write symbols to the tape, and a set of simple instructions that directed the head to read and change the symbols on the tape.
A computer we would recognize today works on the same theory as the Turing Machine but is much more complex.
However, whether we talk of the simple computers built by Babbage and Turing or the complex computer you are reading, the idea remains the same. Accept in the input, process it and then deliver a result.
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