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.
It is not too great a stretch to say that, in the Jacquard loom, programming was invented before the computer. The close relationship between the device and the program became apparent some 20 years later, with Charles Babbage’s invention of the first computer.
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 - 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.
Computer, device for processing, storing, and displaying information. Computer once meant a person who did computations, but now the term almost universally refers to automated electronic machinery.
Computer science is the study of computers and computing, including their theoretical and algorithmic foundations, hardware and software, and their uses for processing information.
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.
The physical elements of a computer, its hardware, are generally divided into the central processing unit (CPU), main memory (or random-access memory, RAM), and peripherals.
Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer programmer. Even though she wrote about a computer, the Analytical Engine, that was never built, she realized that the computer could follow a series of simple instructions, a program, to perform a complex calculation.
