Computer Jobs will be Plentiful in the Twenty-first Century Only once in a lifetime will a new invention come along to touch every aspect of our lives. A machine that has done all of this and more now exists in nearly every business in the US and one out of every two households. This incredible invention is of course the computer!? How many people use computers either at home or at work?Computers have been around us for longer than most of us think. The electronic computer has been around for over a half-century, but its ancestors have been around 2000 years!However, only in the last 40 years has it changed the American society. The computer has changed nearly every aspect of peoples lives.The earliest existence of the modern computers ancestors is the abacus. It is simply a wooden rack holding parallel wires on which beads are strung. When these beads are moved along the wire according to programming rules that the user must memorize, all ordinary arithmetic operations can be performed.In the early 1800s a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage invented the first punch card computer. Which read holes punched into cards. This technology advanced slowly.By the late 1930s punch-card machines had become well established but were very slow.The outbreak of World War II produced a desperate need for computing capability, especially for the military. New weapons were produced which needed trajectory and other essential data. Associates at the University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high-speed electronic computer to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC, which stood for Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator. ENIAC was about 1,000 times faster than the previous generation of computers.In 1947 the first wave of modern programmed electronic computers appeared. This group included computers using random access memory or RAM, which is a memory designed to give almost constant access to any particular piece of informati...
