ilhem von Leibniz improved what Pascal had done by making a machine that could not only add, but also multiply. This machine basically ran the same way that Pascal’s did. An arithometer was developed by Charles Xavier Thomas in 1820. This was the first machine that could finally do the four basic math problems. Up until the First World War, many people used this arithometer.Soon after the invention of the arithometer, Charles Babbage Invented what was called the Difference Engine. This machine was powered by huge amounts of steam. The Difference Engine would have a program that would be stored and it could calculate and print the results. Babbage worked on his Difference engine for several years. While he was working on it he had the idea to start working on the first general-purpose computer. This he called the Analytical Engine and it became the basis for computers, as we know them today.The design of modern day computers started when the government thought they would be very helpful with the beginning of the Second World War. The first one of the computers built was the Z3, developed by Konrad Zuse in 1941, which was used to design missiles and airplanes. Another computer that was developed because of the war was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). This was a huge computer that used 18,000 vacuum tubes, had some 70,000 resistors, and about five million soldered joints. It took 160 kilowatts of electricity to power this computer. That’s enough electricity to dim the lights in an entire section of a large city. The ENIAC was about 1000 times faster than previous computers.The next major step for developing computers was the transistor. This replaced the huge vacuum tubes that were previously used. By having these smaller transistors, the size of computers was reduced greatly. These also made the computer much faster and more reliable also. The only negative quality of transistors was...
