Computers and computer applications are on almost every aspect of our daily lives. As like many ordinary objects around us, we may need clearer understanding of what they are. You may ask "What is a computer?" or "What is a software", or "What is a programming language?" First, let's examine the history.
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 pebble).
John Napier
John Napier was a famous Scottish theologian and mathematician who lived between 1550 and 1617. He spent his entire life seeking knowledge, and working to devise better ways of doing everything from growing crops to performing mathematical calculations. Napier was so intelligent, many of the locals believed him to be in league with the Devil, but such claims never went further than the rumor mill, In fact, Napier himself, and ardent protestant, accused the Pope of being the Anti-Christ, and in a document he considered to be his finest achievement, went as far as predicting the end of the world.
In addition to being an educated man, Napier was also a nobleman, a baron, the 7th Laird of Merchiston, and owner of a considerable estate. Napier was loved by all, and he was respected by many illustrious scientists and mathematicians of the age, to the point of being considered some sort of scientific superstar, with "fans" awaiting his next publication the way we await the release of a movie or pop album.
Napier's "greatest hits" include such groundbreaking texts as A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithms, and his invention of divining rods used as multiplication tables.
Napier's bones
Napier's bones is an abacus created by John Napier for calculation of products and quotients of numbers that was based on Arab mathematics and lattice multiplication used by Matrakci Nasuh in the Umdet-ul Hisab and Fibonacci writing in the Liber Abaci. Also called Rabdology. Napier published his version of rods in a work printed in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the end of 1617 entitledRabdologiæ. Using the multiplication tables embedded in the rods, multiplication can be reduced to addition operations and division to subtractions. More advanced use of the rods can even extract square roots. Note that Napier's bones are not the same as logarithms, with which Napier's name is also associated.
The abacus consists of a board with a rim; the user places Napier's rods in the rim to conduct multiplication or division. The board's left edge is divided into 9 squares, holding the numbers 1 to 9. The Napier's rods consist of strips of wood, metal or heavy cardboard. Napier's bones are three dimensional, square in cross section, with four different rods engraved on each one. A set of such bones might be enclosed in a convenient carrying case.
A rod's surface comprises 9 squares, and each square, except for the top one, comprises two halves divided by a diagonal line. The first square of each rod holds a single digit, and the other squares hold this number's double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, and so on until the last square contains nine times the number in the top square. The digits of each product are written one to each side of the diagonal; numbers less than 10 occupy the lower triangle, with a zero in the top half.
A set consists of 10 rods corresponding to digits 0 to 9. The rod 0, although it may look unnecessary, is obviously still needed for multipliers or multiplicands having 0 in them.
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work ofEvangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented themechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called the Pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was a mathematician of the first order. He helped create two major new areas of research. He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. His results caused many disputes before being accepted.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. His father died in 1651. Following a mystical experience in late 1654, he had his "second conversion", abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In this year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids.
Pascal had poor health especially after his eighteenth year and his death came just two months after his 39th birthday.
Pascaline
In 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. At the age of 12, he was discovered doing his version of Euclid's thirty-second proposition on the kitchen floor. Pascal went on to invent probability theory, the hydraulic press, and the syringe.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (July 1, 1646 – November 14, 1716) was a German mathematician andphilosopher. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin (~40%), French (~30%) and German (~15%).
Leibniz occupies a prominent place in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy. He developed the infinitesimal calculus independently ofIsaac Newton, and Leibniz's mathematical notation has been widely used ever since it was published. He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is at the foundation of virtually all digital computers. In philosophy, Leibniz is mostly noted for his optimism, e.g., his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one that God could have created. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or prior definitions rather than to empirical evidence. Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and information science. He wrote works on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, philosophy, and philology. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. As of 2011, there is no complete gathering of the writings of Leibniz.
Leibniz
Leibniz (1646-1716) successfully introduced a calculator onto the market. It is designed in 1673 but it takes until 1694 to complete. The calculator can add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Wheels are placed at right angles which could be displaced by a special stepping mechanism.
The speed of calculation for multiplication or division was acceptable. But like the Pascaline, this calculator required that the operator using the device had to understand how to turn the wheels and know the way of performing calculations with the calculator.
This Device can multiply, devide, add and substract. Mechanical device made of copper and steel. Carriage is performed with a stepped wheel, which mechanism is still in use today.
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage was born in London Dec. 26, 1791, St. Stephan day, in London. He was son of Benjamin Babbage, a banking partner of the Praeds who owned the Bitton Estate in Teignmouth and Betsy Plumleigh Babbage. It was about 1808 when the Babbage family decided to move into the old Rowdens house, located in East Teignmouth, and Benjamin Babbage became a warden of the nearby church of St. Michael.
The father of Charles was a rich man, so it was possible for Charles to receive instruction from several elite schools and teachers during the course of his elementary education. He was about eight when he had to move to a country school to recover from a dangerous fever. His parents sentenced that his "brain was not to be taxed too much"; Babbage wrote: "this great idleness may have led to some of my childish reasonings."
Then, he joined King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon, a thriving comprehensive school that's still operative today, but his fragile health status forced him back to private teaching for a period. Then, he finally joined a 30-student closed number academy managed by Reverend Stephen Freeman. The academy had a big library, where Babbage used to study mathematics by himself, and learned to love it. He had two more personal tutors after leaving the academy. One was a clergyman of Cambridge, and about him Babbage said: "I fear I did not derive from it all the advantages that I might have done.". The other one was an Oxford tutor who teached Babbage the Classics, so that he could be accepted to Cambridge.
Babbage arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1810. He had a big culture - he knew Lagrange, Leibniz, Lacroix, Simpson... and he was seriously disappointed about the math programs available at Cambridge. So he, with J.Herschel, G.Peacock, and other friends, decided to form the Analytical Society.
When, in 1812, Babbage transferred to Peterhouse, Cambridge, he was the best mathematician; but he failed to graduate with honours.
He received an honorary degree later, without even being examinated, in 1814.
In 1814, Charles Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore at St. Michael's Church in Teignmouth, Devon. His father, for some reason, never gave his approvation. They lived in tranquility at 5 Devonshire Street, Portland Place, London.
Only Three of their 8 children became adult.
Tragically, Charles' father, his wife and one of his sons all died in 1827.
Difference Engine
A difference engine is an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. The name derives from the method of divided differences, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial coefficients. Both logarithmic andtrigonometric functions, functions commonly used by both navigators and scientists, can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers.
The historical difficulty in producing error free tables by teams of mathematicians and human "computers" spurred Charles Babbage's desire to build a mechanism to automate the process.
Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was an American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of one of the companies that later merged and became IBM.
Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, where he spent his early childhood. He entered the City College of New York in 1875 and graduated from the Columbia University School of Mines with an "Engineer of Mines" degree in 1879. In 1880 he listed himself as a mining engineer while living in Manhattan, and completed his Ph.D. in 1890 at Columbia University. He eventually moved to Washington, D.C., living in Georgetown, with a home on 29th Street and ultimately a factory for manufacturing his tabulating machines at 31st Street and the C&O Canal, where today there is a commemorative plaque placed byIBM.
Electrical tabulation of data
At the urging of John Shaw Billings, Hollerith developed a mechanism using electrical connections to trigger a counter, recording information. A key idea was that data could be coded numerically. Hollerith determined that if numbers could be punched in specified locations on a card, in the now-familiar rows and columns, then the cards could be counted or sorted mechanically and the data recorded. A description of this system, An Electric Tabulating System (1889), was submitted by Hollerith to Columbia University as his doctoral thesis, and is reprinted in Randell's book. On January 8, 1889, Hollerith was issued U.S. Patent 395,782, claim 2 of which reads:
The herein-described method of compiling statistics, which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.
Hollerith had left teaching and begun working for the United States Census Office in the year he filed his first patent application. Titled "Art of Compiling Statistics", it was filed on September 23, 1884; U.S. Patent 395,782 was granted on January 8, 1889. Patents 395,781 395,782 and 395,783 was published in the Scientific American on January 18, 1889.
Hollerith built machines under contract for the Census Office, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in only one year. The 1880 census had taken eight years. Hollerith then started his own business in 1896, founding theTabulating Machine Company. Most of the major census bureaux around the world leased his equipment and purchased his cards, as did major insurance companies. To make his system work, he invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism and the first key punch (that is, a punch operated by a keyboard); a skilled operator could punch 200–300 cards per hour. He also invented a tabulator. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards. A plugboard control panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowed it to do different jobs without being rebuilt (the first step towards programming). These inventions were among the foundations of the modern information processing industry.
In 1911 four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR). Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, it was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924.
In 1939: Dr. John V. Atanasoff and his assistant Clifford Berry build the first electronic digital computer. Their machine, the Atanasoff-Berry-Computer (ABC) provided the foundation for the advances in electronic digital computers.
In 1941, Konrad Zuse (recently deceased in January of 1996), from Germany, introduced the first programmable computer designed to solve complex engineering equations. This machine, called the Z3, was also the first to work on the binary system instead of the decimal system.
In 1943: British mathematician Alan Turing developed a hypothetical device, the Turing machine which would be designed to perform logical operation and could read and write. It would presage programmable computers. He also used vacuum technology to build British Colossus, a machine used to counteract the German code scrambling device, Enigma.
In 1944: Howard Aiken, in collaboration with engineers from IBM, constructed a large automatic digital sequence-controlled computer called the Harvard Mark I. This computer could handle all four arithmetic operations, and had special built-in programs for logarithms and trigonometric functions.
In 1945: Dr. John von Neumann presented a paper outlining the stored-program concept.
In 1947: The giant ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator) machine was developed by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr. at the University of Pennsylvania. It used 18, 000 vacuums, punch-card input, weighed thirty tons and occupied a thirty-by-fifty-foot space. It wasn't programmable but was productive from 1946 to 1955 and was used to compute artillery firing tables. That same year, the transistor was invented by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Labs. It would rid computers of vacuum tubes and radios.
In 1949: Maurice V. Wilkes built the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer), the first stored-program computer. EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), the second stored-program computer was built by Mauchly, Eckert, and von Neumann. An Wang developed magnetic-core memory which Jay Forrester would reorganize to be more efficient.
In 1950: Turing built the ACE, considered by some to be the first programmable digital computer.
The First Generation (1951-1959)
In 1951: Mauchly and Eckert built the UNIVAC I, the first computer designed and sold commercially, specifically for business data-processing applications.
In 1950s: Dr. Grace Murray Hopper developed the UNIVAC I compiler.
In 1957: The programming language FORTRAN (Formula translator) was designed by John Backus, an IBM engineer.
In 1959: Jack St. Clair Kilby and Robert Noyce of Texas Instruments manufactured the first integrated circuit, or chip, which is a collection of tiny little transistors.
The Second Generation (1959-1965)
In 1960s: Gene Amdahl designed the IBM System/360 series of mainframe (G) computers, the first general-purpose digital computers to use integrated circuits.
In 1961: Dr. Hopper was instrumental in developing the COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) programming language.
In 1963: Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, produced the PDP-I, the first minicomputer (G).
In 1965: BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language developed by Dr. Thomas Kurtz and Dr. John Kemeny.
The Third Generation (1965-1971)
In 1969: The Internet is started.
In 1970: Dr. Ted Hoff developed the famous Intel 4004 microprocessor (G) chip.
In 1971: Intel released the first microprocessor, a specialized integrated circuit which was ale to process four bits of data at a time. It also included its own arithmetic logic unit. PASCAL, a structured programming language, was developed by Niklaus Wirth.
The Fourth Generation (1971-Present)
In 1975: Ed Roberts, the "father of the microcomputer" designed the first microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which was produced by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). The same year, two young hackers, William Gates and Paul Allen approached MITS and promised to deliver a BASIC compiler. So they did and from the sale, Microsoft was born.
In 1976: Cray developed the Cray-I supercomputer (G). Apple Computer, Inc was founded by Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak.
In 1977: Jobs and Wozniak designed and built the first Apple II microcomputer.
In 1980: IBM offers Bill Gates the opportunity to develop the operating system for its new IBM personal computer. Microsoft has achieved tremendous growth and success today due to the development of MS-DOS. Apple III was also released.
In 1981: The IBM PC was introduced with a 16-bit microprocessor.
In 1982: Time magazine chooses the computer instead of a person for its "Machine of the Year."
In 1984: Apple introduced the Macintosh computer, which incorporated a unique graphical interface, making it easy to use. The same year, IBM released the 286-AT.
In 1986: Compaq released the DeskPro 386 computer, the first to use the 80036 microprocessor.
In 1987: IBM announced the OS/2 operating-system technology.
In 1988: A nondestructive worm was introduced into the Internet network bringing thousands of computers to a halt.
In 1989: The Intel 486 became the world's first 1,000,000 transistor microprocessor.
In 1993: The Energy Star program, endorsed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), encouraged manufacturers to build computer equipment that met power consumption guidelines. When guidelines are met, equipment displays the Energy Star logo. The same year, Several companies introduced computer systems using the Pentium microprocessor from Intel that contains 3.1 million transistors and is able to perform 112 million instructions per second (MIPS).
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