Information Machines

Read or watch any history of the computer, and you usually use terms like "mathematics" and "calculator," inferring that computers are mainly sophisticated calculators. However, as you use computers, whether a desktop computer or a smartphone, you may already realize that you don't use a computer to do a lot of calculating. You use it for just about everything but a calculator. The first machines that led to the development of the modern computer were indeed developed to do calculations, such as artillery shell trajectories. However, computers were soon turned to tasks that had a lot more to do with storing and manipulating non-mathematical data.

One of the first significant uses of computers was database management. Banks and insurance companies were the first big business to use computers to keep track of their accounts. Another early adopter of computer technology was the government, such as the Social Security Department and state departments of motor vehicles.

The following pages follow the development of different technologies that make up the modern general-purpose computer. It all had to start with the ability to store information in a way that a machine can read it. After that came machines that could perform mathematical operations on such data. It all finally led to machines that could take in information, store it, manipulate it, and present the results of that manipulation in a useable form.