Question

The first mechanical computer designed by Charles Babbage was called?
1. Abacus
2. Analytical Engine
3. Calculator
4. Central processing unit (CPU)

Answer 1

Correct Answer - Option 2 : Analytical Engine

The correct answer is Analytical Engine. 

• Analytical Engine generally considered the first computer, designed and partly built by the English inventor Charles Babbage in the 19th century (he worked on it until his death in 1871).
• While working on the Difference Engine, a simpler calculating machine commissioned by the British government, Babbage began to imagine ways to improve it.
• Chiefly he thought about generalizing its operation so that it could perform other kinds of calculations.
• By the time funding ran out for his Difference Engine in 1833, he had conceived of something far more revolutionary: a general-purpose computing machine called the Analytical Engine. 
• The Analytical Engine was to be a general-purpose, fully program-controlled, automatic mechanical digital computer.
• It would be able to perform any calculation set before it. 
• The machine was designed to consist of four components: the mill, the store, the reader, and the printer. These components are the essential components of every computer today.

• Abacus:
  • Abacus, plural abaci or abacuses, calculating device, probably of Babylonian origin, that was long important in commerce.
  • It is the ancestor of the modern calculating machine and computer.
  • The earliest “abacus” likely was a board or slab on which a Babylonian spread sand so he could trace letters for general writing purposes. 
  • The word abacus is probably derived, through its Greek form abakos, from a Semitic word such as the Hebrew ibeq (“to wipe the dust”; noun abaq, “dust”). 
  • The abacus, generally in the form of a large calculating board, was in universal use in Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as in the Arab world and in Asia.
  • It reached Japan in the 16th century. The introduction of the Hindu-Arabic notation, with its place value and zero, gradually replaced the abacus, though it was still widely used in Europe as late as the 17th century and survives today in the Middle East, China, and Japan; an expert practitioner can compete against many modern mechanical calculating machines.
• Calculator:
  • Calculator, machine for automatically performing arithmetical operations and certain mathematical functions.
  • Modern calculators are descendants of a digital arithmetic machine devised by Blaise Pascal in 1642.
  • Later in the 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz created a more advanced machine, and, especially in the late 19th century, inventors produced calculating machines that were smaller and smaller and less and less laborious to use.
  • In the early decades of the 20th century, desktop adding machines and other calculating devices were developed. Some were key-driven, others required a rotating drum to enter sums punched into a keyboard, and later the drum was spun by an electric motor.
• A central processing unit (CPU):
  • The central processing unit (CPU), the principal part of any digital computer system, generally composed of the main memory, control unit, and arithmetic-logic unit.
  • It constitutes the physical heart of the entire computer system; to it is linked various peripheral equipment, including input/output devices and auxiliary storage units.
  • In modern computers, the CPU is contained on an integrated circuit chip called a microprocessor.
  • The control unit of the central processing unit regulates and integrates the operations of the computer.
  • It selects and retrieves instructions from the main memory in proper sequence and interprets them so as to activate the other functional elements of the system at the appropriate moment to perform their respective operations.