Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace are by designed by Babbage's calculating machine Analytical Engine as a pioneer of the modern universal programmable computer, while Konrad Zuse (Z3, 1941, and Z4, 1945), John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly (ENIAC, 1946), the first universal programmable computer built.
At first, the information processing (input and output of data) is limited to the processing of numbers. With increasing performance opened up new areas of application. Computers are found today in all areas of daily life. For example, are integrated micro computer (embedded system) for the control of washing machines and other everyday devices in the VCR to the coin validation in vending machines, even in the mobile phone puts a computer, personal computer, information processing in business and government and from private individuals to serve; Supercomputers are used, to simulate complex processes, such as in climate research or for medical problems and thermodynamic calculations.
The term computer-derived from the verb (to) compute (in Latin: computare = add up, '), originally referred to people who carried out extensive calculations in most cases, for example, for astronomers in the Middle Ages. In 1938, Konrad Zuse's first freely programmable mechanical computer ago (Z1), which corresponded to the already present sense of the term. In 1946, the public naming of the featured Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC, short) for the first time the word appears as part of their name. As a result, computers became established as a generic term for these new machines.