A bit of computer history

The first computers in the world

In 1943, Alan Turing, a British computer scientist and cryptologist, built a
decryption machine that not only helped the Allies win the Second World War,
but was also the prototype of today's computers. It is on its basis that Collosus
was created, the first programmable computer in the world used for military
purposes. At the same time, the famous ENIAC computers are developed in
the United States, used by the army for calculations related to ballistics. This
machine weighed 27 tons, was 30 meters long and covered an area of 167
square meters. Eight years later, the creators of ENIAC built UNIVAC I, the
first commercial and mass-produced computer. In the 1960s and 1970s,
smaller computers began to find their way into large enterprises and
administrative units, and they slowly appeared in individual users.
How have the parameters of computers changed?
The first notebook was the IBM 5100, manufactured in 1975. It weighed 25
kilograms and worked only with constant access to electricity. From today's
perspective, his mobility was very conventional. Its high price made it
inaccessible to most individual users. The computer market was revolutionized
only by the IBM PC 5150, which was launched in 1981. Today, this model is
considered the first personal computer. It was the first to be mass-produced,
cheaper and more accessible than its predecessors. With this model, IBM has
set the standard for PC design and configuration. The IBM 5150 very quickly
began to be copied by other computer manufacturers, and cheap models for
everyone began to appear on the market. This computer was equipped with a
16-bit Intel 8088 processor and 16 KB of RAM. Interestingly, it did not have a
hard drive. The data had to be stored on floppy disks, which offered 160 KB
space. The processor used in the IMB PC was characterized by a clock
frequency of 4.77 MHz and 29 thousand transistors. Thanks to the
advancement of Intel technology, today's processors achieve clock speeds of
3.5 GHz and the number of transistors in excess of one million. This means
that today's laptops are a thousand times more efficient than their stationary
predecessors. Processors manufactured today, despite being much more
efficient, also consume much less energy. Other computer components have
also evolved significantly. RAM that used to be 16 KB in size today can be as
high as 16 GB. Hard drives today reach the size of 1 TB, capable of storing an
infinite amount of data. Computer manufacturers are moving away from classic
hard drives in favor of SSDs, i.e. drives without moving parts. They are much
more durable and much faster