A computer is a programmable device for processing, storing, and displaying information. Learn more in this article about modern digital electronic computers and their design, constituent parts, and applications as well as about the history of computing.

Computer - History, Technology, Innovation: How did the abacus lead to modern computers? The earliest known calculating device is the abacus, dating back to at least 1100 BCE and still in use today, particularly in Asia. The abacus showed that calculations could be represented physically and manipulated systematically. Its use of discrete bead positions—on or off—anticipated the digital ...

Computer - Supercomputing, Processing, Speed: The most powerful computers of the day have typically been called supercomputers. They have historically been very expensive and their use limited to high-priority computations for government-sponsored research, such as nuclear simulations and weather modeling. Today many of the computational techniques of early supercomputers are in common use in ...

A computer is a machine that can store and process information. Most computers rely on a binary system, which uses two variables, 0 and 1, to complete tasks such as storing data, calculating algorithms, and displaying information. Computers come in many different shapes and sizes, from smartphones to supercomputers weighing more than 300 tons.

Computer - Technology, Invention, History: By the second decade of the 19th century, a number of ideas necessary for the invention of the computer were in the air. First, the potential benefits to science and industry of being able to automate routine calculations were appreciated, as they had not been a century earlier. Specific methods to make automated calculation more practical, such as ...

A computer is a device for working with information. The information can be numbers, words, pictures, movies, or sounds. Computer information is also called data. Computers…

ENIAC, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, built during World War II by the United States and completed in 1946. The project was led by John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and their colleagues. ENIAC was the most powerful calculating device built to that time.

Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician, a major contributor to mathematics, cryptanalysis, computer science, and artificial intelligence. He invented the universal Turing machine, an abstract computing machine that encapsulates the fundamental logical principles of the digital computer.

computer science, Study of computers, their design (see computer architecture), and their uses for computation, data processing, and systems control, including design and development of computer hardware and software and programming.

Computer science is the study of computers and computing, including their theoretical and algorithmic foundations, hardware and software, and their uses for processing information. The discipline of computer science includes the study of algorithms and data structures and artificial intelligence.