Digital Storytelling : A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainmen

Chapter 2 A Brief History of the Computer 17
Figure 2.1
The abacus was humankind’s first computing device.
the machine was never put into widespread use. Almost two centuries later, in 1833,
Charles Babbage, a British professor of mathematics, came up with the idea for a
device he called the Analytic Engine. Envisioned as a general-purpose computer,
it was to be fed by punched cards and operated by a steam engine. Sadly, his visionary
device was never completed.
Many decades later, however, in 1890, another punch-card machine was
successfully built and put into operation. The inventors were Herman Hollerith
and James Powers, and they designed an automatic computing machine for the
United States Census Bureau. Hollerith formed a business called the Tabulating
Machine Company to utilize their punch-card technology. After merging with
several other companies, the company was reborn in 1924 as IBM.
Punch-card machines were the computing workhorses of the business
and scientific world for half a century. The outbreak of World War II, however,
hastened the development of the modern computer. Because of the war, machines
were urgently needed to do complex calculations, and to perform them swiftly.
The first of the new wave of computing machines to be completed was the
Colossus computer, built by Alan M. Turing of Great Britain in 1943. The machine
made an important contribution to the war effort by decoding Nazi messages and
is considered by a number of historians to be the world’s first all electronic computer.
The majority of historians, however, believe the trophy should be awarded to
the ENIAC (Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer), which was completed
in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. The ENIAC could perform calculations
about 1000 times faster than the previous generation of computers. It could do
360 multiplications per second and 5,000 additions.
Despite the ENIAC’s great speed, however, it did have some drawbacks. It was
a cumbersome and bulky machine, weighing thirty tons, taking up 1,800 square feet