COMPUTER SCIENCE
From slow beginnings, computers have developed the speed and complexity by which they process billions of pieces of information in a second and solve problems beyond practical human reach. The first computing devices were simple beginning with the abacus, a rectangular array of beads mounted on rods, used since at least 1 100 B.C. for basic arithmetic.
During the Renaissance, innovators from Leonardo da Vinci to Gottfried Leibniz and Blaise Pascal designed or built machines that could add and subtract (Leibniz's Step Reckoner even multiplied.) But the 1800s saw the first machines that could translate programmed instructions, store in formation, and branch through alter native processes depending on prior
outcomes. Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French weaver, developed a loom that used punched cards to execute complicated designs. In the 1820s, English man Charles Babbage envisioned a steam-driven Analytical Engine that would store a thousand large numbers, decipher punch-card instructions. switch operations based on outcomes, and feed results to a printer,
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Babbage's wonder was never built, but in the 1930s inventors like Howard Aiken and John Viricent Atanasoff began using vacuum tubes and electronic circuits to build increasingly powerful machines. They also expen mented with pressing instructions in binary code, reducing Information to Is and Os. That work culminated in the World War Il-era development by Alan Turing of the Colossus, a code cracking machine. In 1946, the room size Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) became the first modern computer in operation. By 1964, integrated circuits helped move computers into the commercial world, with IBM's first mainframe office com puter. A decade later, microprocessors made machines faster and smaller.
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