Computers: Living in the Digital Age
The earliest prototype computer was designed and built by Charles Babbage in 1822. This prototype weighed over 700 pounds and used vacuum tubes. It also used a rotating drum that had small capacitors on it. The first digital computer was invented by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. They both started to build this monster of a machine in 1945 and finished in February, of 1946. This PC was the first fully programmable, reprogrammable, and digital computer. This project was funded by the U.S Government costing them over $400,000, that's $6.6 Million dollars in today's money. The computer was given the name E.N.I.A.C (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). The computer used 174,000 watts of electricity an hour. That’s 174 times the power used by a singular blender an hour. It would cost the government about $800 dollar a day to run the machine.
Computer science and coding took off in the early 80's with almost every American household having a computer by the end of the 80´s. From 1946 to 1980 lots of upgrades and modifications have been added to computers to protect your eyes, personal data, and safety. In the last five years, gaming has exploded with many adults making money off of streaming platforms.
Between the 80´s and the early 2010´s humanity has made many leaps in computing power, memory, graphics, response time, and appearance. Currently, as of the early 2020´s, countries have been competing with each other by building supercomputers. An example of a supercomputer is a computer called Deep Blue (1997). This computer is able to think of 200 million moves a second in chess. Surprisingly this computer’s RAM space is only one gigabyte, that is only four gigabytes of storage.
In the last year or two, scientists have been speculating about creating a quantum computer able to think for itself. Fortunately, this is just a concept that scientists have been considering for a couple years now. In the grand scheme of technology computers have been the most helpful.
