Birth of an Industry Microcontroller

Significant technological breakthroughs usually result from seeking a solution to a problem and they add to a body of existing knowledge. The development of solid-state electronic followed this pattern building on the limitations of early computers and leading to this development of the transistors in 1947.

One problem occurred prior to the 1890 U.S. census. It was predicted that the 1890 census would take 10 years to condense and correlate by manual tabulation. This length of time was unaccepted and led the U.S. Census Bureau to sponsor a contest for a new method of process mechanical tabulating machine that completed the census data crunching in an amazing six weeks. His Machine was a mechanical system driven by an electrical motor that introduced the punch card.Hollerith went on to form the Tabulating Machine Company,Which eventually evolved into the International Business Machine Corporation(IBM).

This tabulating machine was one of the earliest computers, A machine that was designed to perform automatic calculations on data. The technology of computer continued to progress in the 1930s with the development of computers using electromechanical switch. During World War II, intelligent and fast machine to crack secret codes were developed. One result of these efforts was the world's first electronic computer, the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculation or ENIAC for short. The ENIAC was first demonstrated ata the Moore School of Engineering in Pennsylvania in 194.

ENIAC hardly fits the modern picture of a computer. It occupied some 3000 ft2, weighed 50 tons,generated large quantities of heat, required the service of a small power station and cost $400,000 in 1940 dollars.