The history of computer

The History Of

Computer Charles Babbage Was Invented The First Calculating Computer

CHARLES BABBAGE

Charles Babbage is credited as the inventor of the first mechanical computer.

The first, programmable “computing machine”

Without getting too technical, the first “computing machine” was

created by Charles Babbage in 1822. His idea was not really to create

a computer as we know them today, but instead, to create a machine

that would compute math problems. He was tired of human errors in

completing math problems, so he sought to create an infallible math

machine, but what he got instead was a machine that was the basis

for what we know now as the computer.

THE FIRST CALCULATING MACHINE

Charles Babbage’s machine, the Babbage machine was the first programmable,

analytical machine and it was a fully automatic calculating machine.

Fundamentally, modern day computers do the same thing, read a program and

execute it.

It was programmable

The unique thing about Babbage’s machine was that you could

program it. Previous invention of the calculator was already available

but worked on a fixed sets of rules.

Invention of the computer

I sn’t it amazing that the invention Babbage sought to create ended up

being something that would benefit human life centuries later?

Babbage used the knowledge he gained through his education to work

on a machine that would figure out math problems. Unfortunately, he

never got to see the full completion of his dream project because he

ran out of money. Although his machine was left uncompleted, his idea

was later developed into a version of the computer that we know of

today, and Babbage is generally considered the “father of computers”.

History of Computers Part 1

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The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers) were given this name because they performed the work that had previously been assigned to people. "Computer" was originally a job title: it was used to describe those human beings (predominantly women) whose job it was to perform the repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigational tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs. Imagine you had a job where hour after hour, day after day, you were to do nothing but compute multiplications. Boredom would quickly set in, leading to carelessness, leading to mistakes. And even on your best days you wouldn't be producing answers very fast. Therefore, inventors have been searching for hundreds of years for a way to mechanize (that is, find a mechanism that can perform) this task.

THE OLD ABACUS & MODERN ABACUS

The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus operator can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with a hand calculator (multiplication and division are slower). The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. The abacus is still in use today, principally in the far east. A modern abacus consists of rings that slide over rods, but the older one pictured below dates from the time when pebbles were used for counting (the word "calculus" comes from the Latin word for

MODERN ABACUS

Note how the abacus is really just a representation of the human fingers: the 5

A more modern abacus

NAPIER’S BONE In 1617 an eccentric (some say

mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier's Bones.

A MODERN NAPIER’S BONE

A more modern set of Napier's Bones

Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

CALCULATING CLOCK

The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the calculating clock, so named by its inventor, the German professor Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. This device got little publicity because Schickard died soon afterward in the bubonic plague.

PASCALINEIn 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) but couldn't sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren't that accurate (at that time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the required precision). Up until the present age when car dashboards went digital, the odometer portion of a car's speedometer used the very same mechanism as the Pascaline to increment the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel. Pascal was a child prodigy.

PART 2 ANALYTICAL ENGINE Babbage was not deterred, and by then

was on to his next brainstorm, which he called the Analytic Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines, would be more general purpose in nature because it would be programmable, thanks to the punched card technology of Jacquard. But it was Babbage who made an important intellectual leap regarding the punched cards. In the Jacquard loom, the presence or absence of each hole in the card physically allows a colored thread to pass or stops that thread (you can see this clearly in the earlier photo).

HISTORY OF COMPUTER PART 3IBM continued to develop mechanical calculators for sale to businesses to help with financial accounting and inventory accounting. One characteristic of both financial accounting and inventory accounting is that although you need to subtract, you don't need negative numbers and you really don't have to multiply since multiplication can be accomplished via repeated addition.

But the U.S. military desired a mechanical calculator more optimized for scientific computation. By World War II the U.S. had battleships that could lob shells weighing as much as a small car over distances up to 25 miles. Physicists could write the equations that described how atmospheric drag, wind, gravity, muzzle velocity, etc. would determine the trajectory of the shell.

But solving such equations was extremely laborious. This was the work performed by the human computers. Their results would be published in ballistic "firing tables" published in gunnery manuals. During World War II the U.S. military scoured the country looking for (generally female) math majors to hire for the job of computing these tables. But not enough humans could be found to keep up with the need for new tables. Sometimes artillery pieces had to be delivered to the battlefield without the necessary firing tables and this meant they were close to useless because they couldn't be aimed properly. Faced with this situation, the U.S. military was willing to invest in even hair-brained schemes to automate this type of computation.

APPLE 1 The Apple 1 which

was sold as a do-it-yourself kit (without the lovely case seen here)

Computers had been incredibly expensive because they required so much hand assembly, such as the wiring seen in this CDC 7600:

AN INTEGRATED CIRCUIT ("SILICON CHIP") [PHOTO COURTESY OF IBM]

The primary advantage of an integrated circuit is not that the transistors (switches) are miniscule (that's the secondary advantage), but rather that millions of transistors can be created and interconnected in a mass-production process. All the elements on the integrated circuit are fabricated simultaneously via a small number (maybe 12) of optical masks that define the geometry of each layer. This speeds up the process of fabricating the computer -- and hence reduces its cost -- just as Gutenberg's printing press sped up the fabrication of books and thereby made them affordable to all.

One of the earliest attempts to build an all-electronic (that is, no gears, cams, belts, shafts, etc.) digital computer occurred in 1937 by J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University. By 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns.

HISTORY OF COMPUTERS PART 4

The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the "computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off their progress were some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").

ENIAC

Two views of ENIAC: the "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator" (note that it wasn't even given the name of computer since "computers" were people)

EDVACEckert and Mauchly's next teamed up with the mathematician John von Neumann to design EDVAC, which pioneered the stored program. Because he was the first to publish a description of this new computer, von Neumann is often wrongly credited with the realization that the program (that is, the sequence of computation steps) could be represented electronically just as the data was. But this major breakthrough can be found in Eckert's notes long before he ever started working with von Neumann. Eckert was no slouch: while in high school Eckert had scored the second highest math SAT score in the entire country.

THE ORIGINAL IBM PERSONAL COMPUTER (PC)

This transformation was a result of the invention of the microprocessor. A microprocessor (uP) is a computer that is fabricated on an integrated circuit (IC). Computers had been around for 20 years before the first microprocessor was developed at Intel in 1971. The micro in the name microprocessor refers to the physical size. Intel didn't invent the electronic computer. But they were the first to succeed in cramming an entire computer on a single chip (IC). Intel was started in 1968 and initially produced only semiconductor memory (Intel invented both the DRAM and the EPROM, two memory technologies that are still going strong today).

But a new Intel employee (Ted Hoff) convinced Busicom to instead accept a general purpose computer

chip which, like all computers, could be

reprogrammed for many different tasks (like controlling a keyboard, a display, a printer, etc.). Intel argued that since the chip could be reprogrammed for alternative purposes, the cost of developing it could be spread out over more users and hence would be less expensive to each user. The general purpose computer is adapted to each new purpose by writing a program which is a sequence of instructions stored in memory (which happened to be Intel's forte).

A typical Busicom desk calculator

CHARLES BABBAGE

Father | Male Born 26 Dec 1791 Crosby Row, Walworth Road,

London  Baptism 6 Jan 1792 St Mary, Newington, London  Died 18 Oct 1871 Dorset Street, Marylebone,

London  Buried 24 Oct 1871 Kensal Green Cemetery, London  Married 25 Jul 1814  St Michael, Teignmouth,

Devon   Father Benjamin Babbage  Mother Elizabeth Plumleigh "Betty" Teape 

GEORGIANA WHITMORE

Mother | FemaleBorn 1792 Dudmaston Hall, Quatt, Bridgnorth, Shropshire 

Baptism 8 Apr 1792 Quatt, Shropshire  Died 4 Sep 1827 Worcester, Worcestershire  Father William Whitmore   Mother Frances Barbara Lyster 

BENJAMIN HERSCHEL BABBAGE

Child 1 | MaleBorn 6 Aug 1815 Marylebone, London 

Baptism 1 Dec 1815 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road, London 

Died 20 Oct 1878 St Mary's, South Australia  Spouse Laura Jones  Married 10 Sep 1839 Bristol, Somerset 

CHARLES WHITMORE BABBAGE Child 2 | Male

Born 22 Jan 1817   Baptism 19 Feb 1817 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road,

London  Died 1827 Devonshire Street, London  Buried 29 Jul 1827 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road, London 

GEORGIANA WHITMORE BABBAGE Child 3 | Female

Born 17 Jul 1818 Marylebone, London  Baptism 30 Oct 1818 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road,

London  Died Yes, date unknown  

EDWARD STEWART BABBAGE Child 4 | Mae Born 15 Dec 1819 Marylebone, London  Baptism 10 Mar 1820 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road,

London  Died 26 Nov 1821 Marylebone Road, London  Buried 29 Nov 1821 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road,

London 

FRANCIS MOORE BABBAGE

Child 5 | Male Born 1 Jun 1821 Devonshire Street, London  Baptism 6 Jun 1821 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road, London  Died 1822 Devonshire Street, London  Buried 1 Jun 1822 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road, London

DUGALD BROMHEAD BABBAGE

Child 6 | Male Born 13 Mar 1823 Marylebone Road, London  Baptism 11 Apr 1823 St Marylebone, Marylebone

Road, London  Died 23 Aug 1901 Southampton,

Hampshire Buried   

HENRY PREVOST BABBAGE

Child 7 | Male Born 16 Sep 1824 Marylebone, London  Baptism 22 Oct 1824 St Marylebone,

Marylebone Road, London  Died 29 Jan 1918 Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire Buried   

ALEXANDER FORBES BABBAGE

Child 8 | Male Born 1827  Died 1827 Devonshire Street, London  Buried 15 May 1827 St Marylebone, Marylebone Road,

London 

PREPARED BY; BOIM 2-3

AMALIA TAJARAN MARY JEAN IBABAO KIMBERY ESPINO DEODILYN FLORES ERA MAE LUZORATA ROMAR FUENTES

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