Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [] read the truest computer of Times, and the best ...
A more interactive form of computer use developed commercially by the middle 1960s. In a time-sharing system, multiple teleprinter and display terminals let many people share the use of one mainframe computer processor, with the operating system assigning time slices to each user's jobs. This was common in business applications and in science ...
Computer engineering is a discipline that integrates several fields of electrical engineering and computer science required to develop computer hardware and software. [34] Computer engineers usually have training in electronic engineering (or electrical engineering ), software design , and hardware-software integration, rather than just ...
Human computers were involved in calculating ballistics tables during World War I. [38] Between the two world wars, computers were used in the Department of Agriculture in the United States and also at Iowa State College. [39] The human computers in these places also used calculating machines and early electrical computers to aid in their work ...
The storage of computer programs is key to the operation of modern computers and is the connection between computer hardware and software. [7] Even prior to this, in the mid-19th century mathematician George Boole invented Boolean algebra —a system of logic where each proposition is either true or false.
Parts from four early computers, 1962. From left to right: ENIAC board, EDVAC board, ORDVAC board, and BRLESC-I board, showing the trend toward miniaturization. The principle of the modern computer was first described by computer scientist Alan Turing, who set out the idea in his seminal 1936 paper, [69] On Computable Numbers.
Eventually, the concept of numbers became concrete and familiar enough for counting to arise, at times with sing-song mnemonics to teach sequences to others. All known human languages, except the Piraha language, have words for at least the numerals "one" and "two", and even some animals like the blackbird can distinguish a surprising number of items.
In 1948, the Manchester Baby was completed; it was the world's first electronic digital computer that ran programs stored in its memory, like almost all modern computers. [52] The influence on Max Newman of Turing's seminal 1936 paper on the Turing Machines and of his logico-mathematical contributions to the project, were both crucial to the ...