content://com.android.chrome.FileProvider/images/screenshot/1619286930793-913740781.jpg
Computers and electronics play an enormous role in today's society, impacting everything from communication and medicine to science.
Although computers are typically viewed as a modern invention involving electronics, computing predates the use of electrical devices. The ancient abacus was perhaps the first digital computing device. Analog computing dates back several millennia as primitive computing devices were used as early as the ancient Greeks and Romans, the most known complex of which being the Antikythera mechanism. Later devices such as the castle clock (1206), slide rule (c. 1624) and Babbage's Difference Engine (1822) are other examples of early mechanical analog computers.
The introduction of electric power in the 19th century led to the rise of electrical and hybrid electro-mechanical devices to carry out both digital (Hollerith punch-card machine) and analog (Bush’s differential analyzer) calculation. Telephone switching came to be based on this technology, which led to the development of machines that we would recognize as early computers.
The presentation of the Edison Effect in 1885 provided the theoretical background for electronic devices. Originally in the form of vacuum tubes, electronic components were rapidly integrated into electric devices, revolutionizing radio and later television. It was in computers however, where the full impact of electronics was felt. Analog computers used to calculate ballistics were crucial to the outcome of World War II, and the Colossus and the ENIAC, the two earliest electronic digital computers, were developed during the war.
With the invention of solid-state electronics, the transistor and ultimately the integrated circuit, computers would become much smaller and eventually affordable for the average consumer. Today “computers” are present in nearly every aspect of everyday life, from watches to automobiles.
STARS Articles
STARS articles are peer-reviewed articles on the history of major developments in technology. Available in the computers and information processing category are:
Differential Analyzers
Early Punched Card Equipment, 1880 - 1951
Early Popular Computers, 1950 - 1970
Electronic Calculators: Desktop to Pocket
IBM System/360
Inventing the Computer
Software Industry
Word Processing for the Japanese Language
Subcategories
Automation - The use of information technologies and control systems to reduce the need for human labor in the production of goods and services
Circuitry - Included are topics which deal with the workings and issues dealing with circuitry, such as circuit noise, silicon on insulator technology and circuit synthesis
Computational and artificial intelligence - Covers aspects dealing with artificial intelligence from a computational standpoint
Computer applications - Various practical applications of computing such as computer aided design and telecommunications community
Computer architecture - The inner workings of computers, including data structures, system buses and distributed computing
Computer classes - Different kinds of computers, such as calculators, analog and digital computers.
Computer networks - Topics dealing with networking, such as IP networks, multicasting and WAN.
Computer science - The mathematical, algorithmic and scientific elements of computing are included here, such as algorithm analysis, programming and graph theory.
Computing - Various types of computing such as high performance, mobile and optical computing
Consumer electronics - Electronic devices designed for consumer purchases such as sound systems
Contacts - Electrical contacts for joining electrical circuits
Data systems - Topics dealing with systems that process data
Digital systems - Systems like metropolitan area networks and token networks are covered under this category
Distributed computing - All aspects of distributed computing including client-server systems, peer to peer computing and file servers are included in this category
Electron devices - Electron devices and tubes such as cathode ray tubes, vacuum tubes and electron guns
Electronic components - Topics pertaining to components such as capacitors, resistors, diodes and switches
Electronic equipment manufacture - Various elements related to the manufacturing element of components, circuitry and devices are included in this category
Filtering - Different types of filtering methods such as active, Bragg and harmonic filters
High-speed electronics - Includes integrated circuits, networks, and Ultrafast electronics.
Image processing - Topics relating to processing of computer images
Imaging - Devices which display an object's outward appearance
Industrial electronics - Power electronics used in an industrial setting
Information display - Electronic and liquid screens and displays
Information theory - The processing of information via the use of applied mathematics and electrical engineering
Integrated circuits - One of the 20th century's largest breakthroughs in electronics, integrated circuits paved the way for miniaturized electronics
Logic devices - Logic gates and arrays are among the concepts which provide a foundation for digital circuits
Memory - Computer memory such as analog memory, flash memory and read only memory are included
Multitasking - Multitasking is the act of performing two or more tasks at the same time
Open systems - Computer systems which provide a platform of interoperability
Oscillators - Various kinds of oscillators and their applications related to electric devices
Pattern recognition - Methods of using computers to recognize patterns such as character recognition, data mining and text recognition
Pervasive computing - A ubiquitous computing model in which information processing is integrated with common objects
Sensors - A sensor is a measurement device which produces a readable signal
Software & software engineering - Topics dealing with various elements of software and its design
Solid state circuits - Devices composed of a solid material where the flow of electronics is confined to the solid material
System recovery - Various aspects of system recovery and backup such as core dumps and debugging
Thermal management of electronics - Topics dealing with heat in electronics
Tunable circuits and devices - Topics dealing with circuits and devices which may be tuned such as RLC circuits
Pages in category "Computing and electronics"
The following 1,445 pages are in this category, out of 1,445 total.
1
New Technologies in the Summer of 1959
3
First-Hand:39 years with IBM
A
First-Hand:A Birth of Gapless Metal Oxide Surge Arrester (MOSA) and Early Days of Its Promotion Activities
First-Hand:A Brief Account of Spell Checking as Developed by Houghton Mifflin Company
First-Hand:A Hidden Voltage Source
First-Hand:A Look Back over the First 50 Years of IEEE
First-Hand:A Memorable Period
A Small-C cross-compiler for the IBM 1401
Archives:A Survey of MOS Process Technologies
M. Robert Aaron
Abbey Road Studios
ACE Computer
Jeanne Clare Adams
Robert W. Adams
Oral-History:Willis Adcock
Oral-History:Michael Adler
Archives:Aerospace Computer Characteristics and Design Trends
Howard Aiken
Oral-History:William Ross Aiken
Oral-History:Rachid Alami
Alan Conrad Bovik
Samuel N. Alexander
Oral-History:Alicia Casals
Oral-History:Royal P. Allaire
Oral-History:Frances "Fran" Allen
Oral-History:Allison Okamura
Saul Amarel
Amateur Radio
Milestones:American Standard Code for Information Interchange ASCII, 1963
First-Hand:An Eclectic Electrical Engineer
Oral-History:Fred Andrews
Oliver L. Angevine
Antenna Measurements
Dimitri A. Antoniadis
Antun Domic
Tomonori Aoyama
Milestones:Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)
Milestones:Apollo Guidance Computer, 1962-1972
Erdal Arikan
Oral-History:Ronald Arkin
ARPANET
Milestones:Inception of the ARPANET, 1969
ASCII
Oral-History:Eric Ash
Kevin Ashton
Oral-History:William Aspray
Mansour H. Assaf
Morton M. Astrahan
Oral-History:Karl Astrom
Karl J. Astrom
Archives:Karl Aström Interview
John V. Atanasoff
Milestones:Atanasoff-Berry Computer, 1939
Archives:Mike Athans Interview
Oral-History:Chris Atkeson
De Forest Audion
Isaac L. Auerbach
Oral-History:Werner F. Auerbacher
David H. Auston
Electrical Power Connectors - Australia
Archives:Jack Avins, The Essence of Engineering
Oral-History:Ayanna Howard
Oral-History:James Aylor
Hertha Ayrton
B
Archives:The Computer Pioneers: Garry J. Tee Discusses Charles Babbage
Archives:The Computer Pioneers: Garry J. Tee Discusses Charles Babbage, segment 1
Archives:The Computer Pioneers: Garry J. Tee Discusses Charles Babbage, segment 2
Giorgio Baccarani
Richard J. Backe
John Backus
Oral-History:Jean Bacon
Victor Bahl
Oral-History:James J. Bailey and Rosalie Dunn
Oral-History:Robert Baim
Oral-History:Kenneth T. Bainbridge
John Logie Baird
Oral-History:Ruzena Bajcsy (2002)
Oral-History:Jack Balde
Oral-History:Christopher Bale
Henry Baltes
Amir Ban
Kaustav Banerjee
Sanjay Kumar Banerjee
First-Hand:Banging the Large Drum Slowly
Avram Bar-Cohen
Oral-History:Paul Baran
John S. Baras
Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley invent the transistor
William S. Barstow
Oral-History:Lionel Barthold
Jean Bartik
Oral-History:Jean Bartik
Tamer Basar
Archives:Batch-Processed Alphanumeric Displays
Archives:BBN computing history: A Culture of Innovation
George A. Bekey
Bell Labs
Archives:Bell Labs & The Origins of the Multimedia Artist
Oral-History:Maurice Bellanger
Richard Bellman
Oral-History:Ottorino Beltrami
Oral-History:Leo Beranek (1996)
Leo L. Beranek
Horst H. Berger
Berger Publishes Paper on Electroencephalogram
Oral-History:Fran Berman
Oral-History:Mary Lee Berners-Lee
Oral-History:Tim Berners-Lee
Claude Berrou
Oral-History:Harold H. Beverage and H. O. Peterson
Marek E. Bialkowski
Oral-History:Gottfried Biegelmeier
Dieter Bimberg
Biology and Computers: A lesson in what is possible
Joel S. Birnbaum
Birth of Radio Location in the United States Navy - Chapter 4 of Radar and the Fighter Directors
Oral-History:Harold S. Black
Nora Stanton Blatch
Oral-History:Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe
Milestones:Code-breaking at Bletchley Park during World War II, 1939-1945
First-Hand:Bletchley Park, Station X - Memories of a Colossus Operator
Oral-History:Ron Blicq
Erich Bloch
Richard M. Bloch
Manuel Blum
Alan Dower Blumlein
First-Hand:BMEWS
Oral-History:Bob Bolles
Andrew H. Bobeck
Oral-History:Jim Bobrow
Oral-History:Susan Bond
Oral-History:Gary Boone
Henry A. H. Boot
Oral-History:Anita Borg
Yan Borodovsky
Oral-History:Berthold Bosch
Jagadish Chandra Bose
Otis Boykin
Nasser Bozorg-Grayeli
John G. Brainerd
Oliver Brand
Walter H. Brattain
Karl Braun
Robert K. Brayton
Paul Breimyer
George R. Briggs
A Brief History of Early British Computers
History of Broadband Impedance Matching
Robert W. Brodersen
Rodney A. Brooks
Gordon Stanley Brown
Walter L. Brown
William C. Brown
Oral-History:Herbert Bruch
Michel Bruel
Oral-History:Per Bruel
Oral-History:Herman Bruyninckx
Randal E. Bryant
Buckyballs and Nanotubes
First-Hand:Building the U.S. Navy's First Seagoing Digital System - Chapter 4 of the Story of the Naval Tactical Data System
Bulletin Board Systems
Oral-History:Richard Burden
U.S. Census Bureau
Mark L. Burgener
Oral-History:Arthur Burks
Robert Page Burr
William Burroughs
Oral-History:C. Sidney Burrus
Vannevar Bush
Dennis D. Buss
C
C
C.L. Liu
Oral-History:James Thomas Cain
Oral-History:Betty Campbell
Archives:Can Direct Interaction With A Computer Serve You?
I. Muzaffer Canay
Federico Capasso
Oral-History:Norm Caplan
Oral-History:Mario W. Cardullo
Oral-History:Brian Carlisle
Oral-History:Carme Torras
E. Finley Carter
William S. Carter
Altair
Aileen Cavanagh
Cavity Magnetron
Archives:A Century of Electricals
Oral-History:Vinton Cerf
Vinton Cerf
First-Hand:Chad is Our Most Important Product: An Engineer's Memory of Teletype Corporation
Oral-History:John Chadwick
E. Leon Chaffee
Oral-History:Britton Chance
Anantha P. Chandrakasan
Oral-History:Carl Chang
Morris Chang
Richard A. Chapman
Oral-History:Charles Maerfeld
Oral-History:John C. Chato
Robert S. Chau
Tze-Chiang Chen
Anne Chiang
Shang-Yi Chiang
Oral-History:Marvin Chodorow
Archives:Choosing a Minicomputer
Henry R. Chope
Oral-History:Howie Choset
Stephen Y. Chou
Sunlin Chou
John Chowning
Clayton M. Christensen
Oral-History:Chuck Thorpe
Oral-History:Fan Chung-Graham
Archives:Circuit Design Using Personal Computers
First-Hand:Circuit Design, Fiber Optics, Games, Detector Arrays, Voice Communications: A Journal of an Electrical Engineer
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society History
Kimberly Claffy
Oral-History:Judy Clapp
David D. Clark
CMOS
Oral-History:John Coales
John Cocke
Edgar F. Codd
Carlos A. Coello Coello
Danny Cohen
Jean-Pierre Colinge
Colossus
First-Hand:Commercialization of Embedded RISC Cores
Communication Technologies and Liberation Movements
Archives:Communications and the Computer
IEEE Electronics Packaging Society History
Archives:The Computer Pioneers: An Experiment in Video Oral History Part One: Origins of Electronic Computation During World War II
IEEE Computational Intelligence Society History
Archives:Workshop on Computer Languages for Process Control
Archives:Computer Aided Network and Circuit Analysis and Design
First-Hand:Computer Hot Flashes and Cold Feet
Computer Language Compiler
Archives:Computer Timesharing - What Is It, and What Can it do for the Electrical Engineer
Computer Viruses
Computing in Poland
Oral-History:Charles Concordia
Frank Conrad
Oral-History:Anthony Constantinides
First-Hand:Contributions of Russell E. Theisen
Lynn Conway
Oral-History:Mary Coombs
Oral-History:Betty Cooper
John A. Copeland
Oral-History:Joel Burdick
Oral-History:Peter Corke
Oral-History:William E. Cory
Patrick Cousot
Oral-History:Wayne Cowell
M. George Craford
John H. Crawford
Creating Magnetic Disk Storage at IBM
Sorin Cristoloveanu
Jon Crowcroft
First-Hand:Cryo CMOS and 40+ layer PC Boards - How Crazy is this?
Oral-History:C. Chapin Cutler