History of Computers

In the 1930's we find that there is a world-wide economic depression going on.

This makes for a slow business climate, but the scientific world

is as active as ever.

1930 The differential analyzer ( invented by Vannevar Bush) is introduced as the first serious attempt to design a computer that can do many kinds of scientific computations.  It is the herald of the modern computer age.

1934 The idea that an automatic calculator would only need a control program, a memory, and an arithmetic unit is advanced by Konrad Zuse,   a famous German civil engineer.

1936  Alan Turing publishes "On Computable Numbers" in which he outlines what is basically the modern computer.

1938  William Hewlett and David Packard founded Hewlett-Packard and produced their first product, a resistance-capacitance audio oscillator that was purchased by Disney to make the sound track for the film "Fantasia."  The company would later become famous for its profitable line of desktop printers.

1939 John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry have a prototype of the binary-based ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).  This machine is often considered the first automatic digital computer.          

1920's    1930's    1940's    1950's     1960's    1970's    1980's    1990's

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