Chapter II.
Four Basic Computing Periods
Characterized by a principal technology used to solve the input, processing, output and
communication problems of the time:
1. Premechanical,
2. Mechanical,
3. Electromechanical, and
4. Electronic
A. The Premechanical Age: 3000 B.C. – 1450 A.D.
1. Writing and Alphabets—communication.
1. First humans communicated only through speaking and picture drawings.
2. 3000 B.C., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (what is today southern Iraq)
devised cuneiform
3. Around 2000 B.C., Phoenicians created symbols
4. The Greeks later adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels; the Romans
gave the letters Latin names to create the alphabet we use today.
2. Paper and Pens—input technologies.
1. Sumerians' input technology was a stylus that could scratch marks in wet clay.
2. About 2600 B.C., the Egyptians write on the papyrus plant
3. around 100 A.D., the Chinese made paper from rags, on which modern-day
papermaking is based.
3. Books and Libraries: Permanent Storage Devices.
1. Religious leaders in Mesopotamia kept the earliest "books"
2. The Egyptians kept scrolls
3. Around 600 B.C., the Greeks began to fold sheets of papyrus vertically into leaves
and bind them together.
4. The First Numbering Systems.
1. Egyptian system:
The numbers 1-9 as vertical lines, the number 10 as a U or circle, the
number 100 as a coiled rope, and the number 1,000 as a lotus blossom.
2. The first place value numbering systems similar to those in use today were
invented between 100 and 200 A.D. in India who created a nine-digit numbering system.
3. Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was developed.
Note: Number system will be discussed in detail later part of this chapter
Further information: Numeral system
1. The First Calculators: The Abacus.
The First Calculator: The Abacus
One of the very first information processors.
B. The Mechanical Age: 1450 – 1840
1. The First Information Explosion.
1. Johann Gutenberg (Mainz, Germany)
Invented the movable metal-type printing process in 1450.
2. The development of book indexes and the widespread use of page numbers.
2. The first general purpose "computers"
1. Actually people who held the job title "computer: one who works with numbers."
Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.
Slide Rule
Early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English clergyman, invented the slide rule.
C. The Electromechanical Age: 1840 – 1940
The discovery of ways to harness electricity was the key advance made during this
period. Knowledge and information could now be converted into electrical impulses.
1. The Beginnings of Telecommunication.
1. Voltaic Battery.
Late 18th century.
2. Telegraph.
Early 1800s.
3. Morse Code.
Developed in 1835 by Samuel Morse
Dots and dashes.
4. Telephone and Radio.
Alexander Graham Bell.
1876
5. Followed by the discovery that electrical waves travel through space and can
produce an effect far from the point at which they originated.
6. These two events led to the invention of the radio
Guglielmo Marconi
1894
2. Electromechanical Computing
1. Herman Hollerith and IBM.
Herman Hollerith (1860–1929) in 1880.
2. Mark 1
Howard Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University
Built the Mark I
Completed January 1942
8 feet tall, 51 feet long, 2 feet thick, weighed 5 tons, used about 750,000 parts
D. The Electronic Age: 1940 – Present
1. First Tries.
Early 1940s
Electronic vacuum tubes.
2. Eckert and Mauchly.
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), fixed, not stored,
program
2. The First Stored-Program Computer(s)
Early 1940s, Mauchly and Eckert began to design the EDVAC - the Electronic Discreet
Variable Computer.
1.
John von Neumann's influential report in June 1945:
o "The Report on the EDVAC"
British scientists used this report and outpaced the Americans.
o Max Newman headed up the effort at Manchester University
Where the Manchester Mark I went into operation in June 1948--
becoming the first stored-program computer.
o Maurice Wilkes, a British scientist at Cambridge University, completed
the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) in 1949—two years before
EDVAC was finished.
Thus, EDSAC became the first stored-program computer in
general use (i.e., not a prototype).
2. The First General-Purpose Computer for Commercial Use: Universal Automatic
Computer (UNIVAC).
Late 1940s, Eckert and Mauchly began the development of a computer called UNIVAC
(Universal Automatic Computer)
Remington Rand.
First UNIVAC delivered to Census Bureau in 1951.
But, a machine called LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) went into action a few months
before UNIVAC and became the world's first commercial computer.
