Реферат: Development Of Computers And Technology Essay Research

jumps since the first video games and word processors. Video games started out

with a game called Pong…monochrome (2 colors, typically amber and black, or

green and black), you had 2 controller paddles, and the game resembled a slow

version of Air Hockey. The first word processors had their roots in MS-DOS,

these were not very sophisticated nor much better than a good typewriter at the

time. About the only benefits were the editing tools available with the word

processors. But, since these first two dinosaurs of software, they have gone

through some major changes. Video games are now placed in fully 3-D

environments and word processors now have the abilities to change grammar and

check your spelling.

Hardware has also undergone some fairly major changes. When computers

entered their 4th generation, with the 8088 processor, it was just a base

computer, with a massive processor, with little power, running at 3-4 MHz, and

there was no sound to speak of, other than blips and bleeps from an internal

speaker. Graphics cards were limited to two colors (monochrome), and RAM was

limited to 640k and less. By this time, though, computers had already undergone

massive changes. The first computers were massive beasts of things that weighed

thousands of pounds. The first computer was known as the ENIAC, it was the size

of a room, used punched cards as input and didn’t have much more power than a

calculator. The reason for it being so large is that it used vacuum tubes to

process data. It also broke down very often…to the tune of once every fifteen

minutes, and then it would take 15 minutes to locate the problem and fix it.

This beast also used massive amount of power, and people used to joke that the

lights would dim in the city of origin whenever the computer was used.

The Early Days of Computers

The very first computer, in the roughest sense of the term, was the

abacus. Consisting of beads strung on wires, the abacus was the very first

desktop calculator. The first actual mechanical computer came from an

individual named Blaise Pascal, who built an adding machine based on gears and