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Blaise Pascal invents the Pascaline which was similar to the Abacus, but it was able to calculate numbers up to 8 figures long.
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Joseph Jacquard invents a sort of programmable loom that consists of multiple holes in a card that is put into the loom which creates a pattern.
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During the 1850s Charles Babbage creates two different calculating machines. These were called "the difference engine" and "the analytical engine". The difference engine only ever reached it's prototype stage and the analytical engine never left the blueprint stage.
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Near the end of the 19th century Herman Hollerith creates a calculating machine. This machine ran on electricity and use punched cards to store data.
He later founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which later came to be known as IBM. -
During the 1940s, John von Neumann created the computer design rules that we follow even today. These instructions made it possible to store data and programming instructions in the same space.
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With a joint operation between Harvard Unitversity and IBM, the Mark I came to be. It was fed data by punched cards. This monster was 52 feet long, weighed 50 tons and had a grand total of 750,000 parts.
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The ENIAC or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, was built at the University of Pennsylvania. This, slightly less of a monster compared to the Mark I, weighed 30 something tons and had 18,000 vaccum tubes.
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During the 1950s the inventions of transistors made it possible to make computers faster than their previous counterparts. Later, the two first programming languages FORTRAN and COBOL were developed. Soon after the trasistors, "chips" were invented. Chips allowed the ability to process at much faster speeds and continously make them smaller and faster.
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In 1951 the UNIVAC or Universal Automatic Computer, was constructed and later sold to the U.S. Census Bureau.
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During the 1970s the first breakthrough was the microprocessor, which was an entire CPU, was put on a single computer chip. Seven years later, Stevne Jobs and Stephen Wozinak built the first Apple computer in their garage!
