History of Computers

There were not always major computer companies they had to be founded, such as Apple; it was founded by Steve Jobs, Ron Wayne, and Steve Wozniak in April 1976 in Los Altos, California. Apple soon became on of the most successful of the early personal computer manufacturers. Also another major computer company is Dell. It was founded in 1984 by Michael Dell. Dell sold computer systems directly to their costumers. On February 14, 1924, Thomas Watson founded the IBM Corporation which became a major computer company. In 1939, another soon to be major computer company, Hewlett-Packard, was founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Those are the founding of some major computer companies and there are many more.

A mainframe is nothing more than a very large computer, but it is very much different then the computers we have today. A mainframe is called what it is because it is a main computer and it is built into a frame and when you put the word main and frame together you get mainframe. That’s how it got its name. Since mainframes were so expensive, they were mostly manufactured by large companies such as IBM, Amdahl, Hitachi and more. They were mostly used for large-scale computing purposes, for example they were used in banks, insurance companies, etc.

The more famous mainframes were the ENIAC, MARK I, and the ILLIAC. The ENIAC was made in 1942 and ENIAC stands for electronic numerical integrator and calculator. It was pretty much the first mainframe computer because it was the first to complete more complicated task then the other mainframes that came out before it. In 1943, Howard Aiken, created the first programmable calculator. It is sometimes call the Harvard. The MARK I took up the space of a whole building. The ILLIAC was the first mainframe to be used at a University. The University was “The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign”. It was put on service on September 22, 1952.

Before flash drives people had to put their files on a different form of storage. The first was the 8 inch floppy drive. After magnetic media paper was not being used. It became very popular as it was sturdy, handy, and could store more files etc. than a paper roll could. Then after that the 5.25 inch floppy drive came out and it was double sided, had a bigger storage capacity and was much smaller. After that then cam the 3.5 inch floppy it was smaller and could hold more. It also had a cover so it could be carried along just about anywhere and it would not be damaged by dust etc. Then came the peak of secondary storage, the flash drive. It started with a just a couple megabytes of storage and could be used in any computer with a USB port and it was universal and could be used in any computer without any installation. Now we have flash drives with 1 GB to 8 GB or more of storage space. Now most new computers don’t even have a floppy disk drive built in. In the future their will be something that is better than a flash drive and the flash drives will become obsolete.