Computer Facts for Kids

Meet ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, finished in 1945. This machine was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, and wow, was it massive!

It weighed more than 30 short tons (about 27 metric tons). That’s like stacking up about 50 full-grown elephants! It also took up 1,800 square feet of space.

Imagine trying to move that thing—it needed its own air conditioning system because it got so hot using 17,468 vacuum tubes!

Before there were even electric computers, mathematician Ada Lovelace saw the future! She worked on Charles Babbage's theoretical machine, the Analytical Engine.

In 1843, she wrote down a set of instructions, or an algorithm, to calculate a special sequence of numbers called Bernoulli numbers.

This detailed set of steps is what makes her the world's first computer programmer, proving that computers could do way more than just simple math—they could follow complex recipes!

The Internet you use today has roots in something called ARPANET, which started in 1969 with just four computers connected together in the USA.

It was a way for university scientists to share awesome research and computer power across phone lines—imagine sharing one giant calculator with friends miles away!

By 1973, it had only grown to include over 30 institutions spanning the Atlantic Ocean, connecting a few places in the US and Norway!

The game that launched an entire industry, Pong (1972), wasn't a super-secret project. Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell just asked engineer Allan Alcorn to make a simple ping-pong game for practice!

When Alcorn finished, Bushnell and Dabney were so impressed they decided to manufacture it. They tested the prototype at a local store where it made $40 a day, compared to only $10 for other games!

It was so successful that Atari even released a Home Pong console in 1975 for Christmas, bringing digital sports right into people's living rooms.

Instead of modern, tiny transistors, the massive ENIAC computer used 17,468 vacuum tubes—these were like tiny glass light bulbs that could heat up and switch electrical signals on or off.

Each tube was like a tiny digital switch. To program the machine, engineers didn't type—they literally had to rewire the panels by plugging and unplugging cables!

It was so much like old-fashioned telephone switchboards that it took days to set up a new program, making it much slower to switch tasks than it was to calculate!

When we say 'coding basics,' we mean giving the computer instructions! Early on, these instructions were physically wired into the machine.

To change a program on ENIAC, engineers had to rewire panels and set thousands of switches. This manual setup could take days just to tell the computer what to do next!

Today, you can type 'Hello World' in seconds with a few lines of code, showing how much programming has sped up since the first computers for kids!

A modern smartphone chip often has billions of transistors. For example, some powerful chips have over 11 billion transistors just in the CPU part!

Compare that to the ENIAC, which had only 17,468 vacuum tubes acting as its switches. That means your phone is millions of times more powerful than the world's first big computer!

This change happened because we replaced bulky tubes with tiny transistors that are smaller than a speck of dust!

When Short Message Service (SMS) texting was invented in the 1990s, engineers had to be super careful with the network space.

To make sure messages sent quickly and reliably, they set a limit of just 160 characters for a standard text—that’s why early texts felt so short!

If you write a longer message today, your phone just breaks it into several 160-character chunks behind the scenes—sneaky!

Even though it started small in 1969 with four computers, the ARPANET grew incredibly fast for its time.

By 1973, the network had expanded to connect over 30 institutions and even spanned the Atlantic Ocean, reaching Norway!

This growth showed that connecting computers globally was possible, laying the real groundwork for the worldwide Internet we use today.

Computer programming got way easier thanks to pioneer Grace Hopper! She invented the compiler in the 1950s.

A compiler is a program that translates human-readable code (like English words) into the ones and zeros the computer actually understands.

Before this, programming was super hard! Hopper also helped create COBOL, one of the very first high-level programming languages, making coding accessible for more people.