![]() ![]() One of the most innovative minds of this era was Douglas Englebart, an American engineer. While it was fully digital, the program instructions still had to be manually set into the machine using a plug board.Ĭommercial computer use at this time was limited, though some big corporations would use computers for big money items, such as finding oil deposits. In 1946, the first fully-digital computer, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), was developed in the United States.ĮNIAC was designed specifically to compute values for artillery range tables, so it lacked many features that would have made it a generally useful computer. Others were used for cryptography to decode enemy messages (as seen in the 2014 movie “Imitation Game”). Some were put on submarines to calculate the path of torpedoes during World War II. In the early 1940s, computers were primarily used for the war effort. This era represented the move from analog, or mechanical, to digital. Machines in this era were fed instructions for the calculations through punch cards (paper tape with holes punched in readable patterns) and were powered by cranking a handle. Similar machines were created by the late-1800s, and were used to perform differential equations to calculate things like tide variations and artillery paths. ![]() The Difference Engine was used to solve polynomial functions. The first concept of a computer, the Babbage Difference Engine pictured below, was developed in the 1820s by Charles Babbage. This era represents the origins of computing – computing has a history that goes back all the way to the 1800s far before modern computers were invented. ![]() Below, I’ve broken the history of computing into three eras, each of which had a technological advancement that has spurred the evolution of text editors. To understand modern text editors, you first have to understand where they came from. In this blog post I’ll discuss some of the history of computing with respect to text editors, and the pros and cons of two of the text editors that developers have a love/hate relationship with – eMacs and Vim. Text editors are fundamental to our work and developers tend to have very strong opinions about which one is the best. Text editors are computer applications that edit plain text. ![]()
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