The concept of inventing hardware to assist in commercial productivity is not new. For example, thousands of years ago the Chinese sought greater efficiency in calculating numbers, leading to the invention of the abacus, a hand-held mechanical device. Another hardware milestone was reached when Charles Babbage, in 1822, proposed a machine that would calculate mathematical tables; much of his design was used in later computers (Long and Long, 1999). Herman Hollerith designed a method to store numbers onto punched cards in order to calculate the 1890 census, and the company he founded eventually became IBM Corporation (Long and Long, 1999).

The Computer Era Begins

The first electronic computer, the ENIAC, was developed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. It used vacuum tubes and weighed thirty tons. Remington Rand Corporation produced the first commercial computer, the Univac, in 1951, which also used transistors (Long and Long, 1999). Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, were far smaller, and...