AP Computer Science: General History Of Computers

Quinn Hill

Mrs. Rodger

AP Computer Science

23 May 2016

General History of Computers In today’s society we are surrounded and immersed in technology at every corner. Often, we don’t take time to think about how these extraordinary machines came to be. Computers these days are so technologically advanced that information can be accessed at the snap of your fingers. This was not always the case though, computers of the past have come a long way over the last hundred years or so. In 1880 the population began to grow so large in the U.S that we were unable to take accurate population census poles. The government began to look to the world of machines to do the work for them. Herman Hollerith fixed this problem by designing a punch card system to count the people, he then went on to create a company that would become IBM. This was important because companies like IBM have paved the way for the computers that we know today. In 1936, Alan Turing came up with the concept of a machine that can solve anything that needs computing. This was a ridiculous idea at first because it didn’t seem plausible but through his work he created what he later called the Turing machine.The modern computers of today are based roughly on his concepts. In 1943, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert built the first electronic numerical integrator and calculator. This was

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