Historical Developments in Computers to the 1950 s 1

The start of the computer revolution is considered to have taken place with the development of the ENIAC electronic digital computer in 1946, slightly more than 50 years ago, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. I will trace the the scientiic developments that led to the ENIAC and other computers developed at around the same time. In antiquity, Euclid developed the rst algorithm and Aristotle developed Aristotelian logic, fundamental to computers. Contributions were made in the 1600s by Schickard, Pascal and Leibniz who developed calculators. In the 1800s the Jacquard Loom for weaving patterns was innuential in the development of digital computers proposed and detailed by Charles Babbage. Mathematical contributions were made by George Boole, and the vacuum tube, to be used in the early electronic digital computers was developed by John A. Fleming. In the 1930s, Alan Turing developed the concept of an abstract machine, the Turing Machine that is able to simulate any digital computer. The rst digital computers were started in the In the 1940s the rst large scale electronic digital computer, the ENIAC was designed and developed by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Work on the ENIAC led to the concept of the stored program computer, in which the computer program and the data to be operated upon co-existed in main memory. Computers innuenced by the stored program concept developed in the 1950s are discussed. A discussion is also presented of programming developments that are fundamental to the development of computers.