HISTORY OF COMPUTERS

History of computers

I've been struggling to know the first computer that ever existed on earth..what is the first computer?? How it looked like? or is it a term that emerged from calculator?This is the question that haunts many computer students including me..

The answer to this question can be explained in different ways:But a simple answer is

Computer was actually a "job title" given to people,which is used to describe those human beings(predominantly women)whose job was to perform repetitive calculations in tide charts,navigation tables and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs.

Hour after hour and day after day if we were given such heinous tasks to perform calculations repetitively..what will happen?? The work will be "Boring" we become "Careless" and this leads to mistakes i.e., we provide "inaccurate" data and we don't get the results very fastly!! So investors have been searching for a way to mechanize this work!! That is the reason why computers have been invented..Earlier there used to be mechanical computers and later electronic computers have come into existence!!

C PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Denis Ritchie,The inventor of C Programming Language

Writing about C makes me feel nostalgic as it brings back memories of my good old high school days where we used to have a "computers lab" where they used to teach us LOGO,BASIC and C.I feel C is the simplest & dearest of all..It is the first step towards learning a high-level programming language. There is this little tiny book which taught us fundamentals in C..Later in engineering 1st year,it is a common subject for all the streams be it cse,ece,eee or mech..The prescribed text book is this big book with a white cover THE C PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE 2ND EDITION BRIAN KERNINGHAM & DENIS RITCHIE..Most of the CBSE students who come to engg colleges are also familiar with this langauge..as i have seen my cousins learning this language from a very popular book titled "LET US C" by a very famous indian author YASHWANT KANETKAR...Its learnt by everyone,so most of the engineering students in india know this language..it is thus a popular high-level language.It basically got popularity because it is used in UNIX,a beautiful operating sytem:) used in mainframes..(not to mention it is learnt by the most famous people ever to live on earth who know not construction but only destruction-HACKERS as i've heard that they write viruses using C..i don't know whether its true or not..if its true,denis ritchie would have certainly felt bad for creating something that hacker dementors can use to create their weapons) Ok now coming back to C,Lets C..

C is a middel-level,general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system..Most of the Programmers love C as it has several advantages such as:

• C is used in writing system programs.

• We can use it on various platforms for writing codes as it is very versatile in writing code for microcontrollers,modern operating systems and many advanced scientific systems.

• It is a procedural language where everything in the form of modules..That is a very big function is broken down into small modules which perform small tasks..Hence C is also called modular language and hence C is necessary to understand C++,an object oriented programming language which is an extension to C.

• It can be used as a low level or high level language...If we interpreting hardware using c we r using it as low level language or if we doing normal programming to create software then using it as high level language.

• It has no strict type checking:)