Frequently
Asked Questions
- Who invented the first computer?
- Who made the first personal computers?
- What was the first laptop?
- What was the first computer bug
and when did computer viruses first appear?
- Who invented the mouse?
1.
Who invented the first computer?
It
all depends on your definition of computer. Charles Babbage
in the 1830s devised a plan for the first stored-program
mechanical computer, using data modeled after the punched
card templates used in industrial (Jacquard) looms. The
first electronic digital computer was the ABC built by John
V. Atanasoff and Clifford
Berry in 1940 at Iowa State University. Several of its
ideas were incorporated into the ENIAC which ran from 1945-1955
and is considered the first functionally useful electronic
digital computer. The patent for ENIAC was awarded to Atanasoff
by court order in 1974. The first commercially available
electronic computer in the USA was the UNIVAC I, bought
by and delivered to the US Census Bureau in 1951.
2.
Who made the first personal computers?
One
of the earliest personal computers was the Intellec 4 by
Intel, using their first commercially produced microprocessor
- the four-bit 4004. The Altair built by MITS was the first
commercially successful personal computer and the computer
Bill
Gates and Paul Allen wrote Microsoft's (then known as
Micro-Soft) first software product for - "BASIC for
the Altair."
3.
What was the first laptop?
The
TRS-80
Model 100 comes as close to it as you will ever get
in 1983. Running on 4 AA batteries, it was popular with
newspaper reporters and made filing stories from the field
much easier, provided they had access to a telephone line.
4.
What was the first computer bug and when did computer viruses
first appear?
Grace
Hopper found a moth had landed in between the solenoid
contacts in the Mark II Calculator, a massive analog computer
at Harvard University, designed by Howard Aiken. She removed
the squashed moth and annotated her log book with an entry
(along with the moth fastened to the page) that referred
to the first "computer bug." Computer viruses
became a problem in the 1980s as DOS based computers began
to proliferate. The file structure utilized by these machines
made it relatively easy in 1986 for the maker(s) of the
"Brain" virus to play havoc with the boot sectors
on floppy disks. In 1988, an anti-virus program was devised
to remove Brain from infected floppies.
5.
Who invented the mouse?
Douglas
Engelbart, then at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI),
demonstrated a mouse-keyboard component at a computer conference
in 1968 in San Francisco.
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