by Carlo Rodriguez

Created on: August 25, 2009   Last Updated: August 28, 2009

The world of technology is an ever-changing realm which is extremely dominant in today's society. Everything we do, from registering for next semester's classes to buying houses, revolves around technology, but especially computers. Computers are now considered a requirement for education, and sometimes work. But all this did not just start in an instant. Computers were being built decades before I was even born, and ever since then, as time passed, improvements and alterations were made to them. Now they are incredibly intelligent pieces of equipment after all those years of development, and all thanks to those who were determined and wanted to make a difference in the world of not only ours, but of technology as well.

Although the history of computers span over decades, it is hard to say when was the first one due to the many classifications and diversity of computers. But to make life simple, I shall begin with the first mechanical computer ever created. The Z1, created by fellow German, Konrad Zuse in the year of 1936. It was a fairly simple computer, only capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with only a limited amount of control logic. The average time it would take to add was five seconds and to multiply, ten seconds. Several years after that, John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry invented the ABC Computer in 1942. This computer invoked three important ideas that are still used even nowadays. Based on information I gathered from Wikipedia, it uses "binary digits to represent all numbers and data", "performs all calculations using electronics rather than wheels ratchets, or mechanical switches", and it "organizes a system in which computation and memory are separated". At last, in 1951 the first commercial computer appeared on the horizon. Created by John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, the UNIVAC I was capable of performing about 1,905 operations per second which was quite a feat at the time. The UNIVACs were mainly used in military bases or universities and others, but not many due to its increasing price which rose from $159,000 to $1,500,000.

Finally the moment we've all been waiting for. IBM enters the race with their first computer, IBM 701 EDPM made in 1952. This new computer was not very far from IBM's next development: the FORTRAN Computer Programming Language. This language turned out to be good to use in general, and is best utilized for numeric computation and scientific computing. It is still used to this day in the

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