The very first computer was the Abacus. It dated back almost 2000 years ago. It was just a wooden rack holding 2 parallel wires with beads strung on it. When these beads were move the user must memorize, and place that in arithmetic operations. In 1694 a man named Blaise Pascal invented the first digital calculating machine. It could add numbers by turning dials. It was used to help Pascal father as a tax collector. It save him time and made his job less stressful. Then in the early 1800’s a man by the name of Charles

The outbreak of World War II produced a desperate need for computing capability for the military. New weapons were produced which needed trajectory tables and other data. In 1942, John W. Mauchley and their associates at the University of Pennsylvania built a high-speed computer. This machine was known as the ENIAC. It could multiply two numbers at the rate of 300 products per second. It done so by finding the value of each product in a multiplication table stored in it’s memory. ENIAC was a 1,000 times faster than any computer that was ever built. ENIAC used 18,000 standard vacuum tubes, took up 1,800 square feet, and used 180,000 watt of electricity. It was very hard to program because one would have to rewire to perform whatever task he/she wanted the computer to do. ENIAC was accepted as the first high speed computer and it was used in many applications from 1946 to 1955. John von Neuman was very interested in the ENIAC, so he took and studied programs and demonstrated that a computer could be very simply and still execute any kind of computation effectively by means of proper-programmed control without the need for any changes in the hardware. Newumann came up with incredible ideas for methods of building and organizing practical, fast computers. These ideas, which came to be known as the stored program technique, became fundamental for future generations of high-speed digital computers.

Babbage invented a new calculating machine. It was automatic! Steam power this incredible machine and it could store up to 1,000 50-digit numbers. This machine not only did addition but it also stored data. This machine done all this by using cards with holes punched in them, which stored the data. His invention was a failure for the most part because lack of precision and lack of demand for such a machine. However between 1850 and 1900’s there were great advances in mathematics and physics that began to rekindle the interest in such machines made by Pascal and Babbage. Many of these new advance involved complex calculations and formulas that were just too time consuming for human calculati

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