Computer games have become very big part of peoples life’s
but to see where they came from I think we should ask first where did computers
come from and what was the first computer? I think to answer this question is
to first look at where the word computer come from.
The word computer
first started to be used in the 16th; it was way to describe someone
who was very good at doing calculations or
computations. This stayed the same until 19th when people saw that
machine build in the 18th were better than people because they could
never stop and were much faster.
Charles Babbage was
considered the creator of the first mechanical computer because in 1822 he came
up with the idea of the difference engine. The difference engine was a machine
that was designed of calculating several sets of numbers and making hard copies
of the results but because of Charles Babbage funding, he was never able to
complete the machine
Later in 1837 Charles Babbage
designed the analytical engine. It was considered
the first concept of a general-purpose computer. It could use punch
cards as memory and a way to program the computer but sadly again because of Charles Babbage funding, he was never able to complete
the machine again. Charles Babbage passes away October 18, 1871
(Age: 79).
Herman Hollerith made a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards,
which could tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. From this he
crated the Tabulating Machine
Company in 1896. In 1924 C-T-R adopted the name International Business Machines (IBM).
In 1936 Konrad Zuse Developed the Z1, the Z1 was
considered the first electro-mechanical binary programmable computer. The Z1
could be programed by inserting punch tape into a punch tape reader and all
output was also generated through punch tape.
On 1937 John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford
Berry begin their work on creating the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry
Computer) The ABC would to be come to be considered as the first
electronic digital computer. The ABC was also the first computer to use vacuum
tubes. The ABC was not competed until 1942.
The Z4 became the first commercial computer, when Konrad
Zuse started work on it in 1942. It was then sold to Eduard Stiefel a
mathematician of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich on July
12, 1950.
The transistor was one of the biggest innovations to
computers. Made in 1947 and crated by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain,
and William Shockley. The transistor is what crated the binary code 0s and
1s (bits) what all computers still use to this very day. It was not until 1956
it was shown at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It all leads to the very first computer game being made in
1962 when Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen created spacewars. A
2 player game, were each player had to kill the other player to win. It was put
on a DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Websites used
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar_(video_game)
No comments:
Post a Comment