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The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals.
Around 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar created what would over the rest of the century become the first successful, mass-produced mechanical calculator, the Thomas Arithmometer. It could be used to add and subtract, and with a moveable carriage the operator could also multiply, and divide by a process of long multiplication and long ...
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS; Japanese: 第五世代コンピュータ, romanized: daigosedai konpyūta) was a 10-year initiative launched in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to develop computers based on massively parallel computing and logic programming.
A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [] read the truest computer of Times, and the best ...
Bell considers the law to be partially a corollary to Moore's law which states "the number of transistors per chip double every 18 months". Unlike Moore's law, a new computer class is usually based on lower cost components that have fewer transistors or less bits on a magnetic surface, etc.
Mary Allen Wilkes working on the LINC at home in 1965; thought to be the first home computer user The 1974 MITS Altair 8800 home computer (atop extra 8-inch floppy disk drive): one of the earliest computers affordable and marketed to private / home use from 1975, but many buyers got a kit, to be hand-soldered and assembled.
The first documented computer architecture was in the correspondence between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, describing the analytical engine.While building the computer Z1 in 1936, Konrad Zuse described in two patent applications for his future projects that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data, i.e., the stored-program concept.
The Nimrod, designed by John Makepeace Bennett, built by Raymond Stuart-Williams and exhibited in the 1951 Festival of Britain, is regarded as the first gaming computer.. Bennett did not intend for it to be a real gaming computer, however, as it was supposed to be an exercise in mathematics as well as to prove computers could "carry out very complex practical problems", not purely for enjoyme