Short Essay on History of COMPUTER
Born in the USA in 1931. Computer has come of age. For years it was monopolized by IBMC USA. It was justifying its name it was originally a calculating gadget. As it grew in age the electric circuits and transistors underwent sophisticated formations. The calculators were left for small manufacturers. They dwarfed themselves to the size of a playing card or even smaller to fit in the pockets and purses of students and businessmen.
Eighties saw the fifth generation of computers performing different functions. They store information as the human brain does. Like human brain they manipulate, compare and come to decisions. While human brain may take a long time a computer meant for a purpose comes to a conclusion developed jointly by IBM and Harvard University in1944. But it was in February 1946 that the world’s first generation calculator called ENIAC came into existence. It could perform 5000 additions per second. The modern computer is billions of times faster and decisive than human brain. Now computers can be classified as main frame, mini and micro computers.
We have trained and specialized in different trades. So have we computers meant for different purposes. One may approach the Astrological Computer; feed it with the qualities and qualifications of the boy and the girl. Within a second it will let one know if the marriage would be successful or not. There are computers that would compose hundreds of pages of a book in a day. Big industrialists and business firms keep their accounts and secrets in computers. Super computers are installed in banks would allow a customer to draw money from any branch in the city or region.
The more sophisticated a man is the more prone is he to diseases. It is true about computers too. In the beginning of the Eighties Pakistan interfered with the border communication system of Indian Forces manned by computers. The Indian soldiers received strange orders and were confused. The USA communication system was infected by computer virus in later eighties. Someone fed one of the computers with strange things that disturbed the whole system and destroyed the labor of billions of man hours.
India, in many cities, has installed computerized reservation system. In Delhi four stations have been interlinked. We are going to interlink many important cities for Railway Reservation. In eighties India installed a Super Computer acquired from USA to interlink all the odd 500 district places of the country with Delhi. Let us be cautious about the virus. By 1988 the fastest Super Computer was manufactured by a US firm, it produced 2.7 billion operations per second. In nineties HNSX a combination of a Japanese firm and one of the USA delivered another super computer ‘Crey3’ which is expected to perform 16 billion operations per second. USA has an eye on a super computer it expects to bring about in the new country. It is aimed at a capability of producing a trillion operations per second.
The most popular computer is the PC computer. It is a micro computer consisting System, Unit, the keyboard and Visual Display unit. It is accompanied by a printer too. It has a keyboard like a typewriter plus the alpha numeric characters. The latest IBM PC has 121 keys on the keyboard which is connected to the system unit of micro computers via a coiled cable. Backed by Internet computer has developed a global electronic community of millions of interconnected computer networks.
Let us wish and hope they are not infested by virus and are not used foe destructive purposes.