ABIA STATE UNIVERSITY, UTURU

P.M.B. 2000

FACULTY OF HEALTH SCIENCE

DEPARTMENT OF NURSING SCIENCE

ASSIGNMENT:

TRACE THE HISTORY OF COMPUTER, TURN THE

NEOLITHIC ERA TO THE ERA OF MINIATURIZATION OF
SYSTEM ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS.

PRESENTED BY

NAME: ACHILEFU GLORY UGOCHI

MATRIC NO: 13/91610

EMAIL:

COURSE TITLE: COMPUTER IN NURSING

COURSE CODE: NSC 326

LEVEL: 400L

LECTURERS NAME: DR. J.U. OGBONNA

DATE: MAY, 2017

INTRODUCTION

Nothing epitomizes modern life better than the computer. For

better or worse, computers have infiltrated every aspect of our

society. Today computers do much more than simply compute:

supermarket scanners calculate our grocery bill while keeping

store inventory; computerized telephone switching centers play

traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of communication

untangled; and automatic teller machines let us conduct banking

transactions from virtually anywhere in the world. But where did

all this technology come from and where is it heading? To fully

understand and appreciate the impact computers have on our lives

and promises they hold for the future, it is important to understand

their evolution.

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THE NEOLITHIC COMPUTER

The first computer was found about 3500 years ago in England.

The computer was made of some huge stones arranged in a

circular manner on a large piece of ground. Different types of

astronomical calculations can be done using this computer with

the use of sunrays. This computer with is known as Neolithic

Computer and the mode of calculation is known as Stone-henge

calculation. It is the earliest computer found till date.

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Across Western Europe are collections of standing stones dating back

thousands of years that scientists have long suspected were huge

astronomical computers, but that's largely been a matter of conjecture.

Now a team of scientists from the University of Adelaide has

statistically proven that some of the oldest standing stones in Britain

were deliberately constructed to align with solar and lunar

movements.

Built over 5,000 years ago during the Late Neolithic and early Bronze

Ages, the standing stones of Europe range from small, isolated circles

in the Scottish Isles measuring only nine meters (30 ft) across to huge

complexes 450 m (1,500 ft) wide set in huge ceremonial parks.

One clue to why Stonehenge and the many other stone circles were

constructed is the fact they exhibit alignments with the Sun and the

Moon and various astronomical events, such as sunrise on the

summer solstice, sunset on the winter solstice, the movements of the

Moon during the 18.6 year Metonic cycle, and solar and lunar eclipses

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THE MODERN COMPUTER

Todays electronic computers are recent inventions, stemming from

work that began during World War II. Yet the most basic idea of

computing the notion of representing data in a physical object of some

kind, and getting a result by manipulating the object in some way

is very old. In fact, it may be as old as humanity itself. Throughout

the ancient world, people used devices such as notched bones, knotted

twine, and the abacus to represent data and perform various sorts of

calculations.

First Steps: Calculators

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European

mathematicians developed a series of calculators that used clockwork

mechanisms and cranks. As the ancestors of todays

electromechanical adding machines, these devices werent computers

in the modern sense. A calculator is a machine that can perform

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arithmetic functions with numbers, including addition, subtraction,

multiplication, and division.

The Technological Edge: Electronics

Todays computers are automatic, in that they can perform most

tasks without the need for human intervention. They require a type of

technology that was unimaginable in the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-century inventor Charles Babbage came up with the first

design for a recognizably-modern computer. It would have used a

clockwork mechanism, but the technology of his day could not create

the various gears needed with the precision that would have been

required to get the device to work. The technology that enables

todays computer industry is called electronics. In brief, electronics is

concerned with the behavior and effects of electrons as they pass

through devices that can restrict their flow in various

ways. The earliest electronic device, the vacuum tube, is a glass tube,

emptied of air, in the flow of electrons that can be controlled in

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various ways. Created by Thomas Edison in the 1880s, vacuum tubes

can be used for amplification, which is why they powered early radios

and TVs, or switching, their role in computers. In fact, vacuum tubes

powered all electronic devices (including stereo gear as well as

computers) until the advent of solid-state devices. Also referred to as

a semiconductor, a solid-state device acts like a vacuum tube, but it

is a sandwich of differing materials that are combined to restrict or

control the flow of electrical current in the desired way.

Putting It All Together: The ENIAC

For years, experts have forecast that the trademark of the next

generation will be artificial intelligence (AI), in which computers

exhibit some of the characteristics of human intelligence. But

progress towards that goal has been disappointing. Technologically,

were still in the fourth generation, in which engineers are pushing to

see how many transistors they can pack on a chip. This effort alone

will bring some of the trappings of AI, such as a computers capability

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to recognize and transcribe human speech. Although fourth-

generation tech. A human must turn information into intelligence or

knowledge. Weve tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a

new question.

What appears to truly differentiate the late 1990s from previous years

is the rocket-like ascent of computer networking, both at the LAN and

WAN levels. Many new homes now include local area networks

(LANs) to link the familys several computers and provide all of them

with Internet access. At the WAN level, the Internets meteoric

growth is creating a massive public computer network of global

proportions, and it has already penetrated close to 50 percent of U.S.

households. Youll learn more about the growth and development of

the Internet. Another third-generation innovation was the

development of standards for computer networking.

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SUMMARY

As computers become more powerful and less expensive, the rise of

global networking is making them more valuable. The combination

of these two forces is driving major changes in every facet of our

lives. The microprocessor brought the fourth generation of

computers, as thousands of integrated circuits were built onto a single

silicon chip. As these small computers became more powerful, they

could be linked together to form networks, which eventually led to

the development of the Internet. Fourth generation computers also

saw the development of GUIs, the mouse and handheld devices. The

use of parallel processing and superconductors is helping to make

artificial intelligence a reality. The goal is to develop devices that

respond to natural language input and are capable of learning and self-

organization. There are some applications, such as voice recognition,

that are being used today unlike the Neolithic Computer.

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REFERENCES
Diodorus of Sicily, Book II, 47 (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambr., 1935).

Hawkins, G. S. , Nature 200, 306 (1963). | Article | ISI |

Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Ephermeris (H.M.S.O.,

London 1961).

Van den Bergh, G. , Eclipses 1600 to 1207 (Tjeenk, Willink and Zoon,

Holland, 1954).

Newham, C. A. , The Enigma of Stonehenge (private publication, 1964).

Infoculture The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions, Steven

Lubar. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993.

Alan Turing: The Enigma Andrew Hodges, 1983. Simon & Schuster, New

York.

"Insanely Great," Steven Levy. Popular Science, February, 1994.

"The PC Week Stat Sheet: A Decade of Computing," PC Week. February

28, 1994.

Breakthrough to the Computer Age, Harry Wulforst

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