The computer was born not for entertainment or email but out of a need to solve a serious number-crunching crisis.
By 1880, the U.S. population had grown so large that it took more than seven years to tabulate the U.S. Census results. The government sought a faster way to get the job done, giving rise to punch-card based computers that took up entire rooms.
A computer is a machine or device that performs processes, calculations and operations based on instructions provided by a software or hardware program. It has the ability to accept data (input), process it, and then produce outputs. Computers can also store data for later uses in appropriate storage devices, and retrieve whenever it is necessary. Modern computers are electronic devices used for a variety of purposes ranging from browsing the web, writing documents, editing videos, creating applications, playing video games, etc.
They are designed to execute applications and provide a variety of solutions by combining integrated hardware and software components. Today, we carry more computing power on our smartphones than was available in these early models. The following brief history of computing is a timeline of how computers evolved from their humble beginnings to the machines of today that surf the Internet, play games and stream multimedia in addition to crunching numbers.