Paragraph on “Invention of the Computer” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

Invention of the Computer

The basic thing a computer does is calculate —like addling-up and taking away. Over two thousand ago the Greeks had a very simple machine to help them do their sums. It was called an abacus and used beads sliding wires to stand for units, tens and so on. This was not really a computer because it was worked by hand. Roth traders and early scientists had to spend a lot of time doing sums. A brilliant mathematician, Wilhelm Leibniz, complained in 1671 that men had to ‘lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation’. He thought machines could do it instead. In the last century an Englishman, Charles Babbage, designed an ‘analytical engine’ using hundreds of cogs to do calculations, but did not complete it.

In 1890 the United States census results were worked out by machines. They used cards with holes punched in them to represent information like people’s age and race. Soon ‘punched-card’ machines were used for accounting too.

Early calculating machines were very slow because they used lots of moving metal parts. Faster machines had to use electronic parts. The first large electronic calculator was the British ‘Colossus’ built in 1943. It was used for ‘breaking’ enemy codes.

The first general-purpose computer was the American `Eniac’ (Electronic Numerical ,Integrator And Calculator) constructed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945. It was a huge machine weighing 27 tonnes and used an enormous amount of power — all the lights in the area dimmed when the machine was switched on.