INTRODUCTION
Calculation have always been part of man life. Be it is in his personal life or professional work in office, he has to perform calculations. Without calculation he cannot lead a normal life.
It has always been man’s desire to perform all the calculation correctly, effortlessly and at very fast speed. For this, he has been continuously evolving new mechanisms and building more better tools for calculations.
Ever since ancient time, a technological race has been set up between the complexity of the problems and calculation capabilities of calculating devices.
In this race both the runners have tried their best to stay ahead of each other. Whenever complexity of the calculation takes stride, a machine with more capabilities and power comes into existence. But at the same time, with the advent of new machines, complexity grows multi fold to place new challenges before the machine.
Thus in this race, many calculating devices came into existence and became obsolete, within short period of time.
The race has not yet finished, but to meet the challenges of contemporary complexity, computer in its most powerful form available for use. There is hardly any sphere of life demanding for more capable machines.
History Of Computer
Computer of today are quite powerful, sophisticated and very fast. They were no so in their earlier stages. In fact they have traveled a long distance from primitiveness to sophistication. They took many years to reach the present stage.
Ancient people used pebbles for counting and made scratches on the wall to keep track of their belongings. For example, ten scratches on the wall represented ten goats that they had. After that two new scratches nearby used to be clear indication of new addition made in the fleet.
As they became bit wise, they made use of the objects nearby them and made counting and calculating devices. For example, long time ago they collected wires, wood and beads from here and there and made the first counting devices got developed. After lot of advancements and improvements and improvement calculating devices reached the stage of modern computer. Ever since the birth of abacus, calculating devices have been making continuous progress. A brief historic development of these devices is given below.
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)
The defense department of USA was supposed to design advanced weapons, missiles and aircraft. For this, they had to do lot of complex calculations. This process was not only time consuming but was error prone also. To do this work efficiency, in 1946, scientist of Pennsylvania University designed a new computer.
This computer was 20 feet long and 40 feet high.It consumed as much electric power as was sufficient to light a small city. But this machine was much faster than any earlier machine. It was capable of doing more than 5000 additions, subtraction or 350 multiplications and divisions in a second. This machine was called ENIAC. ENIAC is acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. The biggest problem with this computer was that all the instructions were hardwired within the computer. Thus making modifications in instructions was a very difficult task. This problem was removed from the computers, which came after this computer.
EDVAC(Electronic Discreet Variable Automatic Computer)
EDVAC is acronym for Electronic Discreet Variable Automatic Computer. It was designed and created in 1950 in more school of America. It was capable of taking instructions from external resources. Data and instructions, both could be provided to it, using punched cards. Thus problem of hardwired instructions, which was there in ENIAC, was solved in this computer. Its performance was much better than earlier computers.
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