The History of the Computer
Long before computers were invented, humans realized the need for them. The history of the Computer started about 2000 years ago with the abacus. It is a wooden rack holding two horizontal wires with beads strung on them and was one of the best calculating machines until the seventeenth century (PBS, 1). In 1835, English inventor, Charles Babbage came up with the idea of the Analytical Machine, a general purpose, fully programmed-controlled, automatic mechanical digital computer, which consisted of two parts, a calculating section and a storage section. His machine was capable of reading the punched holes in cards, just as the loom did (Campbell-Kelly, 15-17).
In 1890 Herman Hollerith and James Powers, who worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, developed devices that could read the information that had been punched into cards. The information was recorded by a machine equipped with many metal pins that poked through the punched holes but stopped where......
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