The History of Computing Hardware — How Machines Became Faster, Smaller and Smarter
SUCCESS FOR CAREER 'History of computing hardware: The history of computing hardware is a story of human ingenuity: a steady push to make machines faster, cheaper, more reliable, and able to store vastly more information. From tally sticks and abacuses to multi-core processors and cloud data centers, each leap in hardware has reshaped what we can compute and how we live, work, and communicate. This article traces the major stages of that evolution — the mechanical aids, the early electromechanical and electronic devices, the age of vacuum tubes, transistors and integrated circuits, and the modern microprocessor era — and explains why each step mattered. Before “computers”: people and mechanical aids Long before there were electronic machines, computation was a human task. The word computer originally meant a person who computed. To help those human computers, civilizations invented tools that reduced repetitive mental work. Tally sticks and tokens (used in ancien...