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There are various answers to when the "first computer" was born, most of which are: The world's first computer was the Electronic Numerical Integrator Computer, or ENIAC, which was born in the United States in 1946.

In fact, there is no standard answer to this question, ENIAC is just one of the answers. People have been trying to build machines that can automatically calculate very early in history. After years of development, computers have become what they are today. Many kinds of computers can be counted as "first computers," depending on how you define "computer."

If something that can help us do arithmetic can be called a computer, the ancient abacus should also be called a computer, but it is completely manual.

In the hundreds of years from the 17th century to the 20th century, there were a number of unpowered computers that had no circuit boards inside, just a bunch of mechanical gears.

In the 17th century, there was an "omnipotent superman" Pascal in France. He was a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, fluid dynamicist, and one of the founders of probability theory. Pascal built a box with a bunch of gears inside. As long as the spring was tightened, it could spin. However, this "first mechanical computer" could only perform simple addition and subtraction operations, and its level was probably equivalent to that of a kindergarten child.

Later, the German mathematician Leibniz built a mechanical computer that could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operations. Its computing power reached the level of an elementary school student. The difference engine built by British mathematician Babbage in the 1820s could calculate some mathematical functions. Although Babbage dreamed of building a second-generation Difference Engine with more features, he was ultimately unsuccessful.

Later, people realized that if only mechanical gears were used for calculations, the computing power would be extremely limited. If the computer had to have stronger computing power, it would have to find another way. As a result, electronic computers came into being. Electronic computers work faster on electricity than on gears, so electronic computers have greater computing power. During World War II, the flight trajectories of aircraft and artillery shells on the battlefield required a lot of complex calculations, which gave electronic computers an opportunity to show off their skills. Take the world's first large-scale automatic digital computer "Mark 1" as an example. It can store 72 sets of data, each set of data has 23 decimal places. It takes 300 milliseconds to perform an addition operation, 6 seconds to perform a multiplication operation, and 3 seconds to perform a division operation. Although this speed seems relatively slow now, it has achieved a historic breakthrough in computing technology and helped people complete a large number of computing tasks.

So, who is the inventor of the electronic computer? There are several answers. In 1936, the British mathematician Turing first proposed the concept of a computer that uses the interaction of a program and input data to produce output. Later generations named this machine a universal Turing machine. In 1938, the first computer "Z-1" that used relays to work appeared. However, relays have a mechanical structure and are not entirely electronic equipment. In 1942, Atanasov and Bailey invented the first computer using vacuum tubes, named ABC after their initials. However, ABC can only solve linear equations and cannot do other tasks. Under the guidance of Turing, the first computer "Colosas" that could be programmed to perform different tasks was born in England in 1943 and was used for code breaking.

The first modern electronic computer in human history is recognized as ENIAC, which was born at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. Although it was born some time later than the previously mentioned machines, it possesses the main structure and functions of today's computers, is a general-purpose computer, and is the first computer equivalent to a universal Turing machine.

It is a behemoth, consisting of 17,468 electron tubes, 60,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and 6,000 switches. It covers an area of ​​170 square meters, weighs 30 tons, consumes about 150 kilowatts of power, and can operate every second. 5,000 operations, which may seem insignificant now, but at the time it was unprecedented. ENIAC uses electron tubes as components, so it is also called a tube computer and is the first generation of computers. Because the electron tubes used in electron tube computers are large in size, consume a lot of power, and are prone to heat, they cannot work for too long.

Fortunately, Germany today has technological advantages. Transistor technology has become increasingly mature and has begun to be used in many devices. Therefore, the first computer in this time and space was an electronic product based on transistors and supplemented by electron tubes.

Starting in the 1950s, transistors began to gradually replace vacuum tubes, and eventually enabled the mass production of integrated circuits and microprocessors.

Initially, transistors and transistorized devices were not popular because they were too expensive. But senior military officials are very interested because military equipment has special requirements for portability, reliability and durability. For much of the 1950s, it was support from military brass that kept the young transistor industry alive.

In 1957, the Soviet satellite "Sputnik" launched into space, officially kicking off the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1961, President Kennedy announced that he would "send a man to the moon before 1970." Compared with the Soviet Union, the United States' rocket technology is slightly behind, so it is even more necessary to reduce weight. All electronic equipment uses transistors as much as possible. The semiconductor industry based on transistors has also developed by leaps and bounds. Integrated circuits became the protagonist of this period.

What’s interesting is that Soviet military electronic equipment during the same period took a completely different path. For a long time, they still had a soft spot for vacuum tubes. Due to the continuation of the development ideas of weapons and equipment that were simple, mature, reliable and easy to produce during World War II, the Soviet Union believed that vacuum tube technology was mature and easy to make high-power components, so it focused its main energy on the miniaturization of vacuum tubes. In analog circuits and digital In the selection of circuits, Soviet experts also believed that analog circuits were more mature and more suitable for the working characteristics of vacuum tubes, so they vigorously developed analog circuits with operational amplifiers as the core.

Khrushchev once said, "The survivability of vacuum electron tubes under nuclear electromagnetic pulses is better than that of transistors. The Soviet Union should not develop transistors in the future and concentrate on miniaturizing electron tubes." Due to policy reasons, the Soviet Union's semiconductor industry has always lagged behind that of the West. The quality of the transistors produced has always failed to meet the standards, eventually forming a vicious cycle and becoming more and more dependent on vacuum tubes.

By the mid-1970s, Soviet engineers finally discovered that the road to miniaturization of vacuum tubes had come to an end. If the volume of vacuum tubes was reduced by another order of magnitude, the cost would be astronomical. At this time, the integrated circuits developed by Western countries could integrate 140,000 transistors on a 5 square centimeter silicon wafer. It took the Soviet Union ten years to prove that the miniaturization of electron tubes could not be compared with transistor integrated circuits. In the 1980s, the Soviet electronics industry began to catch up. Before its disintegration, it was able to produce medium-scale integrated circuits, which was close to the level of the West in the early 1980s.