1. Blaise Pascal - Mechanical Calculator Blaise Pascal along with Wilhelm Schickard was one of two inventors of the mechanical calculator in the early 17th Century. Pascal made his invention in 1642. He was spurred to it when participating in the burden of arithmetical labor involved in his father's official work as supervisor of taxes at Rouen. First called the Arithmetic Machine , Pascal's Calculator and later Pascaline , his invention was primarily intended as an adding machine which could add and subtract two numbers directly, but its description could, with a bit of a stretch, be extended to a "mechanical calculator, in that at least in principle it was possible, admittedly rather laboriously, to multiply and divide by repetition.
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1. Blaise Pascal - Mechanical Calculator
Blaise Pascal along with Wilhelm Schickard was one of two inventors of the mechanical calculator in the early 17th Century. Pascal made his invention in 1642. He was spurred to it when participating in the burden of arithmetical labor involved in his father's official work as supervisor of taxes at Rouen. First called the Arithmetic Machine, Pascal's Calculator and laterPascaline, his invention was primarily intended as an adding machine which could add and subtract two numbers directly, but its description could, with a bit of a stretch, be extended to a "mechanical calculator, in that at least in principle it was possible, admittedly rather laboriously, to multiply and divide by repetition.
Joseph-Marie Jacquard was not the inventor of the programmable loom, as many people imagine, actually he created an attachment to the loom, which played a very important role not only in the textile industry, but also in development of other programmable machines, such as computers, for example the Analytical Engine ofCharles Babbage. One of the first improvements of Jacquard was to eliminate the paper strip from Vaucanson's mechanism and to return to Falcon's chain of punched cards. Then, he tried to avoid the expensive metal cylinders of Vaucanson. In fact, the term Jacquard loom is a misnomer, actually Jacquard's invented an attachment (head), that adapts to a great many type of looms, that allow the weaving machine to create the intricate patterns often seen in Jacquard weaving. Thus any loom that uses the attachment is called a Jacquard loom.
Each position in the punched card of the loom corresponds to a hook, which can either be raised or stopped dependant on whether the hole is punched out of the card or the card is solid. The hook raises or lowers the harness, which carries and guides the warp thread so that the weft will either lie above or below it. The sequence of raised and lowered threads is what creates the pattern. Each hook can be connected via the harness to a number of threads, allowing more than one repeat of a pattern. For example, a loom with a 500-hook head might have four threads connected to each hook, resulting in a fabric that is 2000 warp ends wide with four repeats of the weave going across.
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English polymath. He was a mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, who is best remembered now for originating the concept of a programmable computer.
Considered a "father of the computer",Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. His varied work in other fields has led him to be described as "pre-eminent" among the many polymaths of his century.
Parts of Babbage's uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, theAnalytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer.
Konrad Zuse was a German inventor and computer pioneer. His greatest
achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-
controlledTuring-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this
machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the
modern computer.
Zuse was also noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process-
controlled computer. He founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941,
producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From
1943[5] to 1945[6] he designed the first high-level programming language , Plankalkül.[7] In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his
book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space).
Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939
he was given resources by the Nazi German government. Due to World War II,
Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and theUnited States.
8. John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly – 20,000 Vacuum Tubes
John Adam Presper "Pres" Eckert Jr. was anAmerican electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly he invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the first commercial computer company (the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation), and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay line memory.
13. Steve Russell – First Computer Game (MIT Spacewar)
In 1962, Steve "Slug" Russell, a computer programmer working for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), invented Spacewar!, the first popular and earliest known digital computer game.
In 1961, Russell created and designed Spacewar!, with the fellow members of
the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, working on a DEC Digital PDP-1.
The precise origin of the "concept" of computer-based games in general has been
debatedSpacewar!, however, was unquestionably the first to gain widespread
recognition, and it is generally recognized as the first of the "shoot-'em' up" genre
14. Douglas Engelbart – First Computer Mouse and Windows
Douglas Carl Engelbart was an Americanengineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. In the early 1950s, he decided that instead of "having a steady job" (such as his position at NASA's Ames Research Center) he would focus on making the world a better place, especially through the use of computers. Engelbart was therefore a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and computer networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems. Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "bootstrapping strategy". He designed the strategy to accelerate the rate of innovation of his lab.
Alan Field Shugart was an American engineer, entrepreneur and business executive whose career defined the modern computer disk drive industry.With Shugart as Chief Executive Officer, Seagate became the world’s largest independent manufacturer of disk drives and related components. In July 1998, Shugart resigned his positions with Seagate. In 1996 he launched an unsuccessful campaign to elect Ernest, his Bernese Mountain Dog, to Congress. Shugart later wrote about that experience in a book, Ernest Goes to Washington (Well, Not Exactly). He backed a failed ballot initiative in 2000 to give California voters the option of choosing "none of the above" in elections.
Robert Melancton "Bob" Metcalfe is an electrical engineer from the United States who co-invented Ethernet, founded 3Com and formulated Metcalfe's Law. As of January 2006, he is a general partner of Polaris Venture Partners. Starting in January 2011, he holds the position of Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of Innovation at The University of Texas at Austin.
Metcalfe was working at Xerox PARC in 1973 when he and David Boggs invented Ethernet, a standard for connecting computers over short distances. Metcalfe identifies the day Ethernet was born as May 22, 1973, the day he circulated a memo titled "Alto Ethernet" which contained a rough schematic of how it would work. "That is the first time Ethernet appears as a word, as does the idea of using coax as ether, where the participating stations, like in AlohaNet or ARPAnet, would inject their packets of data, they'd travel around at megabits per second, there would be collisions, and retransmissions, and back-off," Metcalfe explained. Boggs identifies another date as the birth of Ethernet: November 11, 1973, the first day the system actually functioned.
Adam Osborne was a Thailand-born British-American author, book and software publisher, and computer designer who founded several companies in the United States and elsewhere.
Osborne was known to frequent the famous Homebrew Computer Club's meetings around 1975. He was best known for creating the first commercially available portable computer, the Osborne 1, released in April 1981. It weighed 24.5 pounds (12 kg), cost US$1795—just over half the cost of a computer from other manufacturers with comparable features—and ran the popular CP/M 2.2 operating system. It was designed to fit under an airline seat. At its peak, Osborne Computer Corporation shipped 10,000 units of "Osborne 1" per month. Osborne was one of the first personal computing pioneers to understand fully that there was a wide market of buyers who were not computing hobbyists: the Osborne 1 included word processing and spreadsheet software. This was at a time when IBM would not bundle hardware and software with their PCs, selling separately the operating systems, monitors, and even cables for the monitor.