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The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals.
The University of Manchester's Baby, the world's first electronic stored-program computer, had successfully demonstrated the practicality of the stored-program approach and of the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory based on a standard cathode-ray tube (CRT), by running its first program on 21 June 1948. [6]
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 ...
Replica of the Atanasoff–Berry computer at Iowa State University The 1946 ENIAC computer used more than 17,000 vacuum tubes. A vacuum-tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry.
Von Neumann's machine design uses a RISC (Reduced instruction set computing) architecture, [dubious – discuss] which means the instruction set uses a total of 21 instructions to perform all tasks. (This is in contrast to CISC, complex instruction set computing , instruction sets which have more instructions from which to choose.)
The analytical engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. [2] [3] It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's Difference Engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical calculator.
The Computer History Museum claims to house the largest and most significant collection of computing artifacts in the world. [a] This includes many rare or one-of-a-kind objects such as a Cray-1 supercomputer as well as a Cray-2, Cray-3, the Utah teapot, the 1969 Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, an Apple I, and an example of the first generation of Google's racks of custom-designed web servers. [8]
X.21, also referred to as X21, is an interface specification for differential communications introduced in the mid-1970s by the CCITT, now ITU-T. X.21 was the first digital signaling interface developed. [2]