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History of Computer: -important people Allen, Paul G. - Co-founder of Microsoft Corp. Allen left the company in 1985 but remained on the board of directors and as founded or financially supported several innovative computer ventures, including Asymetrix and Starware Corp. He is involved with a variety of other projects, including a Jimi Hendrix Museum in Seattle. Amdahl, Gene M - South Dakota native who helped design the IBM 704, the S/360 series. He was the founder of the Amdahl Corp. Andreessen, Marc - Co-founder (at the age of 22) of Netscape Communications, along with Silicon Graphics founder James H. Clark. Before Andreessen graduated from the University of Illinois in Champaign, he had created the NCSA Mosaic prototype with a team of students and staff at the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Babbage, Charles (1791-1871) - Eccentric, English mathematician who is considered to have conceptualized the modern computer a century before technology let it be built. He conceptualized the Difference Engine, a machine that would have computed lengthy scientific tables, but money, labor, and health problems prevented its completion. The Analytical Engine, a more ambitious plan, would have done a wide range of calculating tasks. With it, Babbage recognized the need for an input device, memory, a central processing unit, and an output device, and for this he is known as the Father of Computing. Backus, John W. - Mathematician from Philadelphia who headed the research team at IBM that created FORTRAN, the first machine independent programming language. -important devices/developments Floppy Drive - The floppy drive is always called "Drive A:". A floppy disk can hold 1.5 megabytes of data. That's about 1,500,000 characters or letters (or about 300,000 words). That's more than enough space for the text of a large book. Pictures, however, take up a great deal of room. You could only fit a small number of good-quality pictures (or graphics) on a floppy disk. Hard drive - This drive uses disks that are made of aluminium or glass (and therefore 'hard'). Each disk can store much more information than either a floppy or CD-ROM. Sometimes, there may be several disks in a hard drive. However, the disks in a normal hard drive can not be removed or replaced. Today, hard drives are measured in gigabytes. That's one thousand million bytes. 1 gigabyte is about 11/3 CD-ROM disks. Motherboard - Everything inside the computer is connected to a circuit board called the 'motherboard'.