history of computers1

Early Computational Devices Somewhere around 3000BC the first mechanical counting device created was the abacus. The abacus is still used today and, amazingly to me, with great speed and accuracy. In 1642 another mechanical device was created called the Pascaline (after Blaise Pascal, a famous French mathematician). The Pascaline used gears and wheels ("counting-wheels") to perform the calculations. The interesting thing to note is that the counting-wheel design was used in calculators until the 1960s. The …

…began in the mid 1970s and, as many would argue, is still going on. The trend continues during this period as well; faster, smaller, and cheaper! Integrated circuits continue to get smaller and the circuits continue to get more and more complex. This integration is known as very large scale integration (VLSI). Microcomputers and supercomputers were both created during this time period and telecommunications (making computers communicate with each other) has become the biggest challenge