Digital Age: Digital Technology: Personal Computer

Personal Computing

• Overview:  You may think that computing as we know it is a fairly recent development, but the foundation for modern computing was actually laid in early 19th-century England. Charles Babbage, an inventor, went to King George III's court with a proposal for a difference engine, a machine that could factor polynomials.
  
  The first generation of computers: 1945-1956 The first digital computers, computers that "thought" in terms of 0's and 1's and which could solve a variety of problems, were made of tens of thousands of vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes were phased out in favor of transistors, devices that could transfer electrical current across a resistor.
  
  The BASIC programming language brought computer programming to hobbyists; it was no longer a tool of engineers and businessmen. One of these, Steve Jobs, had a knack for business, and realizing that the computer could grab a lot of attention, he formed a corporation, which he named Apple.
  
  Microsoft licensed a program called DOS (Disk Operating System) which could perform disk and file management. They convinced IBM to bundle DOS, or include it with each new computer. Compaq, Zenith, and others were soon producing computers which were physically identical to IBM PCs (and therefore, could run the same software).
  
  In the early 1980s, Steve Jobs and others at Apple bought an IBM PC to see the latest technological advances they had heard so much about and produced the Macintosh. After several name changes, Microsoft emulated the "look and feel" of the Macintosh named for its most prominent feature, Windows.
  
  Though Windows and the Mac both started off on shaky ground, advances in hardware allowed both products to establish themselves by 1990. Goodbye, mainframes: Personal computers take over in the '90s.  In the early '90s, PCs and Macs could be found in many homes and small businesses, but the big guys--industries with gigabytes of data to process--still used mainframes.
  

More...............................  The History of Computing