Table of contents
-computers have come a very long way since they were first developed
- this presentaiton will explore how they evolved from multimilliondollar calculators to becoming an essential part of business education and entertainment

Early Computing Devices
-	Attempts by humans to develop a tool to manipulate data go back as far as 2600 BC when the chinese came up with the abacus more commonly known as counting frame used by merchants traders and clerks
-	In 1830 the english mathematician Charles Babbage designed an analytical engine which could be programmed with punch cards to carry out calculations
-	It was revolutionary in the sense that it was able to make decisions based on it‘s own computations such as sequential control, branching and looping
-	Almost all computers in use today follow this basic idea laid out by babbage which is why he is often referred to as the father of computers
-	The design was so complex that babbage was never able to build a working model of his design and it was finally built more than 100 years later by the london science museum
First electronic computers
-	Many different types of mechanical devices followed that were built on the idea of the analytical engine
-	The first electronic computers were developed by Konrad Zuse in germany in the period 1935 to 1941.
-	The Z3 was the first working, programmable and fully automatic digital computer, the original was destroyed in world war 2 but a replica has been built by the Deutsches Museum in Munich
-	Because his devices implemented many of the concepts we still use in modern-day computers, Zuse is often regarded as the „inventor of the computer“.
First generation of computers
-	Around the same time the British built the Colossus computer to break encrypted German codes for the war and the americans built the Electronic Numerical Intergrator Analyzer and Computer or short ENIAC.
-	Built between 1943 and 1945 ENIAC weighed 30 tons and was 100 feet long and eight feet high
-	Both colossus and ENIAC relied heavily on vacuum tubes which can act as an electronic switch able to turn on or off much faster than mechanical switches which were used prior to that.
-	Computer systems using vacuum tubes are considered the first generation of computers
-	Vacuum tubes however consume massive amounts of energy, turning a computer into an oven



Second generation
-	the first seemiconductor transistor was invented in 1926 but only in 1947 was it developed into a solid-state, reliable transistor for the use in computer
-	transistors are microscopic switches that control the flow of electricity. These switches can be turned on or off, which makes it possible to store binary information
-	While acting similiar to vacuum tubes, transistor were only a few millimeters in size and generated little heat
-	Computers using transistors are considered the second generation of computers
-	Today’s computers still use tranistors although they are much smaller
First mass-produced computers
-	It took a few years for the transistor technology to mature but in 1954 the company IBM introduced the 650 the first mass-produced computer
-	By 1958 it became possible to combine several compoinents including transistors and the circuitry connecting them on a single piece of silicon.
-	This was the first integrated circuit. Which markst he third generation of computers
-	Integrated circuits led to the computer processors we use today
Personal Computers
-	Computers become quickly more powerful. By 1970 it became possible to squeeze all the integrated circuits that are part of a single computer on a single chip called a microprocessor. Computer systems using microprocessors are considered the fourth generation of computers.
-	In the early 1970s computers were still mostly used by larger corporations, government agencies and universities. The first device that could be called a personal computer was introduced in 1975.
-	The Altair 8800 was made by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. It included an Intel 8080 processor and 256 bytes of memory. There was no keyboard, and instead programs and data were entered using switches. There was no monitor, and instead results were read by interpreting a pattern of small red lights.
-	This computer was mostly used by hobbyists and hackers who would take the devices apart and build their own.
Modern computer entreprenours
-	Two of these hackers, Stephe Jobs and Steve Wozniak, created a personal computer in 1976 that had a keyboard, display and disk storage. They called it the Apple I. Around the same time, two other hackers, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, started to develop software for the Altair 8800 and founded Microsoft.
-	Other computer systems were developed by Radio Shack and Commodore. The next breakthrough came in 1981 when IBM decided to create the personal computer, or PC.
-	Made mostly from already existing components, the IBM PC became a mass-market product in part because the design was made available to other manufacturers. The operating system of the IBM PC was MS-DOS by Microsoft.
-	The 1980s saw a rapid growth in the use of computer systems. By the mid-1980s, both Apple and Microsoft released operating systems with a graphical user interface. This is when personal computers started to look a lot more like the devices we use today.
-	Since then there have been numerous technological advances and computers have become easier to use, more robust and much faster, but the fundamentals of how personal computers work were developed in this period, from around 1970 to 1985.

Trend in Processing Power
-	One key development in computing has been the growth in processing power. Modern computers use transistors.
-	More transistors means that more information can be processed. The capability of computers has grown from a single transistor in the 1950s to millions of transistors in modern processors. This trend is known as Moore's law. Gordon Moore was one of the co-founders of Intel and described the trend that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. He predicted this back in 1975, and so far his prediction has been proven to be quite accurate.