Today we all have a computers for most things! Its amazing really, but the computer has been around for longer than you think.

The first computer ever made was bigger than your room. It had over one million wire’s inside! So do you think your computer’s old?

It was 1939, John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry developed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) at Iowa State University, which was regarded as the first electronic digital computer. The ABC was built by hand and the design used over 300 Vacuum Tubes and had capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory.

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was constructed in the US in 1943. It was the first really useful general-purpose computer. It was a turning point in the history of computing and was used to perform calculations and used 160 kW of power.

World War II is known to be the driving force of computing hardware development and one of such use of computers was in communications encryption and decryption. The most famous of these was the Enigma machine which broke German codes.

And in 1962 the first computer game was made, (YAY!).

The microprocessor eventually led to the development of the microcomputer during the 70′s and 80′s.

These were small, low-cost computers that individuals and small businesses could afford.

In 1985 Microsoft and Apple started a long battle over who made the best computers and software.

By the 1990s, the microcomputer or Personal Computer (PC) became a common household appliance, and became even more widespread with the advent of the Internet. Did you know that the mouse is called the mouse because of the wire coming out ofthe back.

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist known as the inventor of the World Wide Web as we know it today. He made a proposal for an information management system in 1989, and on 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and another young student, he carried out the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.

If the Internet was not here what would we be talking on? We use the internet for lots of things today.

Now you know all about computers and now you are ready for the internet.