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Early
History
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By some definitions, computing devices go back to the period of early cave men when stones were piled together as a means of counting. The earliest computers include:
No ancient structure in England arouses more controversy than Stonehenge, that mysterious ring of monoliths located nine miles north of Salisbury. Archeologists argue whether it was a place of ritual sacrifice and sun-worship, an astronomical calculator, or a royal palace. What exists today is only a small part of the original prehistoric complex, as many of the outlying stones were plundered.
The abacus is a mechanical aid used for counting. It is not a calculator in the sense we use the word today. The device evolved from a simple need to count numbers. Merchants trading goods not only needed a way to count goods bought and sold, but also to quickly calculate the cost of those goods.
Da Vinci was a painter, musician, sculptor, architect, and engineer. However, his contributions to mechanical calculations remained hidden until the rediscovery of two of his notebooks in 1967. These notebooks, which date from sometime around the 1500s, contained drawings of a mechanical calculator, and working models of his device have since been constructed.
John Napier
In the early 1600s, a Scottish mathematician named John Napier invented a tool called Napier's Bones. It consisted of multiplication tables inscribed on strips of wood or bone. Napier, who was the Laird of Merchiston, also invented logarithms, which greatly assisted in arithmetic calculations.
William Oughtred was an English mathematician who invented the first calculator; the Slide Rule- composed of a ruler with a sliding insert. This mechanical device is marked with various number scales, which facilitates such calculations as division, multiplication, finding square roots and finding logarithms. This is considered the first analog computing device.
Blaise Pascal invented the Arithmetic Machine and then built the Pascaline, which was based on interlocking cogs and gears. He built 50 for sale, but clerks and accountants refused to use them for fear it would do away with their jobs
Gottfried Leibnix designed a new type of mechanical calculator based on a cylinder with stepped teeth now called Leibnix wheel. It could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Leibniz also strongly advocated the use of the binary number system, which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers.
Pascal's and Leibniz's devices were the forebearers of today's desktop computers, and derivations of these machines continued to be produced until their electronic equivalents finally became readily available and affordable in the early 1970's.
Jacquard invented the
first punch cards for storing data. He was a Frenchman who
devised a stiff card punched with holes for weavers. The
cards were used to let some strands of thread pass while
blocking others. The
Jacquard
Loom is not directly
related to computers, but the idea of a punch card was later
adapted by Babble as the first mechanical method for
entering information into a computer.
Charles Babbage invented the difference engine, a very large machine funded by the British government that was meant to solve polynomial equations. It was so sensitive that it broke more often than not and a British Prime Minister declared its only purpose was to compute the large amount spent to build it.
Babbage later started the analytical engine which was designed to perform any calculations up to 20 digits. Although it was never built, it included six features crucial to future computers. They include the following:
Augusta Ada
suggested the first concept of computer
programming. She was an amateur mathematician and close friend of Babbage
who had the idea that the analytical engine could be programmed using
a single set of cards for repeating instructions.
Samuel Morse
The American inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse developed the first American telegraph, which was based on simple patterns of "dots" and "dashes" called Morse Code being transmitted over a single wire (the duration of a "dash" is three times the duration of a "dot"). This introduced the Electronic Information age and sparked the first application of paper tapes as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data. This technique would eventually be used by the designers of computers.
George Boole
Boole made significant contributions in
several areas of mathematics, but was immortalized for two
works in 1847 and 1854, in which he represented logical
expressions in a mathematical form now known as Boolean
Algebra. Boole's work was all the more impressive because,
with the exception of elementary school and a short time in
a commercial school, he was almost completely self-educated.
Unfortunately, with the exception of students of philosophy
and symbolic logic, Boolean Algebra was destined to remain
largely unknown and unused for the better part of a century,
until a young student called Claude E. Shannon recognized
its relevance to electronics design.
Herman Hollerith was responsible for the tabulating machine that used punched cards to count electronically. The punched cards were sandwiched between brass rods: where there were holes in the card, the rods made contact and completed an electrical circuit. This device was constructed to allow the 1890 census to be tabulated.
Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company. In 1924, after several mergers and takeovers the company became International Business Machines (IBM).
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