First Computer

History of Computers

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The Internet

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The Internet is a network, or system, that connects millions of computers worldwide. It was one of the greatest inventions of the 1900s. Today the Internet helps many people communicate, work, learn, and have fun.

In the 1960s the U.S. government, businesses, and colleges worked together to make a system that would let computers across the United States share information. They created an early form of the Internet called ARPANET in 1969. In 1971 electronic mail, or e-mail, was invented as a way to send a message from one computer to another.

By the mid-1970s many groups of computers were connected in networks. Machines called routers were invented to connect the networks. This is how the original ARPANET eventually grew into the Internet.

In 1989 hypertext was invented. Hypertext is a link between different parts of an electronic document or between different documents. Hypertext became the basis of the World Wide Web, or “the Web,” which was created in the early 1990s.

Information on the Web is arranged in sites or pages. People view Web sites using computer programs called Internet browsers. People create Web sites using a code called hypertext markup language, or HTML. Browsers read HTML and allow people to view Web sites on the computer. Each Web site has its own Internet address, called a uniform resource locator, or URL.

Since its beginnings, the Internet has changed to keep up with the demands of its users. Advances in technology make using the Internet quicker and easier. And as more and more people use the Internet, the quantity of information grows.

The dream of computing is almost as old as the idea of numbers. The first device for doing arithmetic, the abacus, was invented thousands of years ago. The Italian genius Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical calculator in about 1500 but, like so many of his inventions, the tools did not yet exist to build it. The credit for actually building the first calculator goes to the German astronomer Wilhelm Schickard, for his Calculating Clock in 1623. The first calculator to be produced in quantity was the Pascaline, designed and built by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642.

The invention that turned these calculators into computers came from an idea borrowed from the Jacquard loom. This device used special “cards” that enabled the weaving to be made automatic. In the 1830s the British inventor Charles Babbage adapted this idea to design an automatic computation machine he called the Analytical Engine. The machine was designed to have input devices, a store (memory), a mill (computing unit), a control unit, and output devices—the essential components of every computer today. Babbage ran into trouble completing his Analytical Engine because tools were still not good enough to build all of the small mechanical gears and switches that he needed. Nevertheless, his device is considered to be the first true computer.

Among those who were fascinated with Babbage's invention was a young woman named Augusta Ada King, the countess of Lovelace. She was the daughter of the famous English poet Lord Byron. Lady Lovelace learned enough about the Analytical Engine's workings and how to control it to write about it so that others could also understand what it could do. She is often credited as the first computer programmer.