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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 ...
NACA had begun hiring black women as computers from 1940. [44] One such computer was Dorothy Vaughan who began her work in 1943 with the Langley Research Center as a special hire to aid the war effort, [45] and who came to supervise the West Area Computers, a group of African-American women who worked as computers at Langley. Human computing ...
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 ...
The electromechanical Zuse Z3, completed in 1941, was the world's first programmable computer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine. During the Second World War , Colossus developed the first electronic digital computer to decrypt German messages.
The term computer remained one that referred to mostly women (now seen as "operator") until 1945, after which it took on the modern definition of machinery it presently holds. [ 44 ] The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was the first electronic general-purpose computer, announced to the public in 1946.
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.
This means that one operation would be carried out before another in such a way that the machine would produce an answer and not fail. This machine was to be known as the "Analytical Engine", which was the first true representation of what is the modern computer. [24] Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) predicted the use of computers in symbolic ...
The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, [8] marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, [9] and generated sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the internetwork.