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=The evolution of today's computers:=

The first real computer:
The first real computer was created in 1939 by a young German engineer named Konrad Zuse. It was the first programmable, general-purpose digital computer. He proposed his creation to the German Nazi government to get it supported but it got rejected. During almost the same time period the British goverment was assembling a top-secret team of mathematicans and enginners to crack Nazu military codes. In 1943, the team, led by Alan Turing and others, completed Colossus, considered by many to be the first electronic digital computer. This computer was able to fulfill the quest where human alone wouldn't have been able to. Also at the same time in 1939, at Iowa State University professor John Atanasasoff, seeking a tool to help his students solve differential equations, developed what could have been the first digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). He applied with his project to the company International Business Machines (IBM) but he too got rejected. The Haward professor Howard Aiken was more successful in financing the automatic, general-purpose calctulator he was developing. Thanks to a 1 million $ grant from IBM, he completed the Mark I in 1944. The computer was gigantic compared to the computers we know today and could just calculate 6 times faster than a human could. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert reconstructed the ABC to the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), a 30-ton behemoth with 18 000 vacuum tubes that broke down, on average, once every seven minutes. This computer could calculate 500 times faster than the ABC and about the same speed as a modern pocket sized calculator. The same two men developed then after the war the UNIVAC I, the first general-purpose commercial computer.

Evolution and Acceleration
On 17 November 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, at AT&T Bell Labs, observed that when electrical contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input. William Shockley saw the potential in this and worked over the next few months greatly expanding the knowledge of semiconductors and could be described as the father of the transistor. The term was coined by John R. Pierce. According to physicist/historian Robert Arns, legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and Gerald Pearson had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles.
 * **The transistor:** The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor.
 * **The semiconductor: Semiconductor is a material that has a resistivity value between that of a conductor and an insulator. The conductivity of a semiconductor material can be varied under an external electrical field. Devices made from semiconductor materials are the foundation of modern electronics, including radio, computers, telephones, and many other devices. Semiconductor devices include the transistor, many kinds of diodes including the light-emitting diode, the silicon controlled rectifier, and digital and analog integrated circuits. Solar photovoltaic panels are large semiconductor devices that directly convert light energy into electrical energy. In a metallic conductor, current is carried by the flow of electrons. In semiconductors, current can be carried either by the flow of electrons or by the flow of positively-charged "holes" in the electron structure of the material. Silicon is used to create most semiconductors commercially. Dozens of other materials are used, including germanium, gallium arsenide, and silicon carbide. A pure semiconductor is often called an “intrinsic” semiconductor. The conductivity, or ability to conduct, of semiconductor material can be drastically changed by adding other elements, called “impurities” to the melted intrinsic material and then allowing the melt to solidify into a new and different crystal. This process is called "doping". **
 * **The microprocessor: A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a central processing unit (CPU) on a single integrated circuit (IC). The first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s and were used for electronic calculators, using binary-coded decimal (BCD) arithmetic on 4-bit words. Other embedded uses of 4- and 8-bit microprocessors, such as terminals, printers, various kinds of automation etc, followed rather quickly. Affordable 8-bit microprocessors with 16-bit addressing also led to the first general purpose microcomputers in the mid-1970s. The recent development of fast microprocessors is also linked to the growing popularity of fourth generation programming languages(4GLs).Computer processors were for a long period constructed out of small and medium-scale ICs containing the equivalent of a few to a few hundred transistors. The integration of the whole CPU onto a single VLSI chip therefore greatly reduced the cost of processing capacity. From their humble beginnings, continued increases in microprocessor capacity have rendered other forms of computers almost completely obsolete (see history of computing hardware), with one or more microprocessor as processing element in everything from the smallest embedded systems and handheld devices to the largest mainframes and supercomputers.Since the early 1970s, the increase in capacity of microprocessors has been known to generally follow Moore's Law, which suggests that the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles every two years. In the late 1990s, and in the high-performance microprocessor segment, heat generation (TDP), due to switching losses, static current leakage, and other factors, emerged as a leading developmental constraint. **

All these were the major invention and evolution of hardware to create the computer that we know today.

You can find additional information in the following video: [|Computer history]