A computer is a programmable device for processing, storing, and displaying information. Learn more in this article about modern digital electronic computers and their design, constituent parts, and applications as well as about the history of computing.
Computer - Technology, Invention, History: By the second decade of the 19th century, a number of ideas necessary for the invention of the computer were in the air.
A computer is a machine that can store and process information. Most computers rely on a binary system, which uses two variables, 0 and 1, to complete tasks such as storing data, calculating algorithms, and displaying information.
Computer - History, Technology, Innovation: A computer might be described with deceptive simplicity as “an apparatus that performs routine calculations automatically.”
Computer science is the study of computers and computing, including their theoretical and algorithmic foundations, hardware and software, and their uses for processing information.
Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor who is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. He designed two calculating devices, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, neither of which were fully built. Learn more about Babbage in this article.
Computer - Memory, Storage, Processing: The earliest forms of computer main memory were mercury delay lines, which were tubes of mercury that stored data as ultrasonic waves, and cathode-ray tubes, which stored data as charges on the tubes’ screens.
In 1945, the war over, Turing was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London to create an electronic computer. His design for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was the first complete specification of an electronic stored-program all-purpose digital computer.
A computer programming language is any of various languages for expressing a set of detailed instructions for a computer. The earliest programming languages were assembly languages, not far removed from instructions directly executed by hardware.
