There is no noun with the ability to represent modern life other than computer.
Whether the effect is negative or positive, computers control nearly every aspect of
our everyday life. Computers have evolved from bearing the role of strictly
computing to having the ability of completing unthinkable tasks. Supermarket
scanners calculate our grocery bill while keeping store inventory; computerized
telephone switching centers play traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of
communication untangled; and ATM's let us conduct banking transactions form
Around five thousand years ago in Asia , a simple machine called the
Abacus , bearing a system of sliding beads arranged on a rack such as ones found
in a pool hall may be considered the first computer. Merchants used the Abacus to
record their barter transactions. Its popularity began to fall when the use of paper
and pencil spread particularly throughout Europe, its importance diminished.
Computers were looked at as a way to simplify large workloads into
discreet tasks. The United States census of 1880 took seven years to tally. The fear
of later censuses taking an even more absurd amount of time to count, the bureau
turned to technology. An American inventor also applied the concept to
computing. He fed cards storing data into a machine compiling the results
instinctively. Punched holes in the cards would represent letters and number, a
single hole depicted a number, while a combination of two holes portrayed a letter.
This allowed the census results in six weeks. Not only did the machine remarkably
decrease the amount of time the census took, but also the cards used represented
stored memory of the census and reduced computational errors. It found its way
into the business world founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, which
later became International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. After this point in
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