A Brief History of Electronics and Computer Engineering

It is very difficult to provide a definition of electronics and also to clearly differentiate between electrical and electronics engineering. Many consider electronics as a part of electrical engineering, while some other consider them as two different disciplines. Both electrical and electronics engineers are concerned with the flow of electrons. Electrical engineers deal with mostly the flow of current in the conductors 

The first electronic computer ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) developed in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania had about 18,000 thermionic valves and consumed about 150 kW of electrical power. It was a huge machine weighing over 25,000 kg and filled a room. Initially, it was used for calculating artillery firing tables for the US Army s Ballistic Research Laboratory. 

The first electronic calculator was introduced by the BeU Punch Company of the UK in 1961. This contained discrete components rather than ICs (Ohlman 1990). Universal Data Machines was the first American company to make electronic calculator using metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) chips from Texas Instruments. The first hand-held calculator was developed in 1967. In 1968, Burroughs produced the first computer to use an integrated circuit. 

In 1993, Intel introduced the Pentium Processor. In 2000, Intel introduced Pentium 4, which used about 42 million transistors and had a clock speed of 1.4 GHz. In 2006, Intel introduced the core 2 processor. In 2013, Core i7 were introduced. This reminds the observation of Gordon E. Moore in 1965 and then the 

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