History of

Computing
Chapter 1
Introduction to Social and
Ethical Computing

 Historical Development of Computing

 Development of the Internet
 Development of the World Wide Web
 The Emergence of Social and Ethical Problems in
Computing
 The Case for Computer Ethics Education
 Historical Development
Before 1900AD
 Man sought to improved life through the invention of gadgets.
 First utility tools recorded dealt with numbers
 First recorded on bones – 20,000 to 30,000 B.C.
 First place-value number system in place – 1800 B.C.
 Abacus – Mother of Computers – 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C.
 Zero and Negative Numbers – 300 B.C. and 500 A.D.
 1500AD and 1900AD lot of activities in the development of
computing devices
 Driven by commerce
 1500 Leonardo da Vinci invented mechanical calculator
 1621 invention of the slide rule
 1625 Wilhelm Schichard’s mechanical calculator in
 1640 Blaise Pascal’s Arithmetic Machine
 Major breakthrough in speed up
 1800 AD with the invention of the punched card by Joseph-Marie
Jacquard
 Revolutionized computing
 Quickly spread in other fields
 Speed up computation and storage of information
1500 Leonardo da Vinci invented mechanical calculator
1621 invention of the slide rule
1625 Wilhelm Schichard’s mechanical calculator
1640 Blaise Pascal’s Arithmetic Machine
1800 AD with the invention of the punched card by
Joseph-Marie Jacquard
Historical Development
Before 1900AD
 1830 AD exciting period
 1830 - Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine
 George and Edward Schutz’s Difference Engine
 Within a decade - major milestone
 George Boole’s invention of Boolean Algebra
 Opened fields of mathematics, engineering, & computing
 Lead to the new frontiers in logic
1830 - Charles Babbage’s Analytical
Engine
Historical Development
Before 1900AD
 Mid 1850 through the turn of the century
 1857 - Sir Charles Wheatstone’s invention
 Paper tape to store information
 Created new excitement in the computing community of
the time.
 Huge amounts of data could be entered & stored
 1869AD - Logic Machine by William Stanley Jovons
 ~1874 - first Keyboard by Sholes
 1881 - Rectangular Logic Diagrams by Allan Marquand
1857 - Sir Charles Wheatstone’s
invention
1869AD - Logic Machine by William
Stanley Jovons
1874 - first Keyboard by Sholes
 Historical Development
Before 1900AD
 Mid 1850 through the turn of the century
1886, Charles Pierce - first linked Boolean
Algebra to circuits based on switches
 Major break through in mathematics, engineering and
computing science
1890 - John Venn invented the Venn
diagrams
 Used extensively in switching algebras in both
hardware and software development
1890 - Herman Hollerith invented the
Tabulating Machine
 Utilized Jacquard’s punched card to read the presence
or absence of holes.
 The data read was to be collated using an automatic
electrical tabulating machine
 Large number of clock-like counters
 Summed up and accumulated the results in a number
of selected categories.
1886, Charles Pierce - first linked Boolean Algebra
to circuits based on switches
1890 - Herman Hollerith invented the Tabulating
Machine
 After 1900 AD
 Computing in infancy
 Century began with a major milestone
 Vacuum tube by John Ambrose Fleming.
 Played a major role in computing for the next half
century.
 All digital computer in the first half century ran on
vacuum tubes.
 1906 - triode by Lee de Forest in 1906.
 1926 - first semiconductor transistor
 Not used for several years
 Came to dominate the computing industry in late
years
 1937 - Turing Machine by Alan Turing
 Invention of an abstract computer
 Some problems do not lend themselves to algorithmic
representations, not computable
 1942 - COLOSSUS, one of the first working programmable
digital computers
1906 - triode by Lee de Forest in 1906.
1937 - Turing Machine by Alan Turing
1942 - COLOSSUS, one of the first working
programmable digital computers
 After 1900 AD
 1942 – Turing designed COLOSSUS
 One of the first working programmable digital computers
 1939 – Vincent Atanasoff – 1st digital computer model
 utilized capacitors to store electronic charge to represent
Boolean numbers
 0 and 1 used by the machine in calculations
 Input and output data was on punched cards
 Some doubt it ever worked
After 1900 AD

 Howard Aiken – developed Harvard Mark I

 1st large scale automatic digital computer.
 also known as IBM automatic sequencer calculator-
ASCC
 1943, Alan Turing – COLOSSUS
 Considered 1st programmable compute
 designed to break the German ENIGMA code
 used about 1800 vacuum tubes
 execute a variety of routines.
Howard Aiken – developed Harvard Mark I
After 1900
 John William Mauchly & J. Presper Eckert Jr - ENICAC
 Vacuum tube-based general purpose
 10 feet high
 Weighed 30 tons
 Occupied 1000 square feet
 70,000 resistors
 10,000 capacitors
 6000 switches
 18,000 vacuum tube
 No internal memory
 Hard-wired
 Consistently programmed by switches and diodes
After 1900
 1944-1952 John William Mauchly & J. Presper
Eckert Jr – EDVAC
 Electronic discrete variable automatic computer
 1st truly general purpose digital computer
 Stored program instruction concept
 completed in 1956
 4,000 vacuum tubes and 10,000 crystal diodes
 1948 - UNIVAC I
 1st commercially available computer.
After 1900

 Many companies became involved

 International Business Machines (IBM), Honeywell,
and Control Data Corporation (CDC) in the USA,
and International Computers Limited, (ICL) in UK
 Built mainframe
 Hugh – took entire rooms
 Expensive – use limited to big corporations
Mid to late sixties
 Developed less expensive but smaller computer
 Minicomputer
 Timesharing concept
 Let to idea of networking
After 1900
 1971 and 1976 - first microprocessor
 Built with integrated circuit with many
transistors on a single board
 Vacuum tubes and diodes no longer used
 Ted Hoff
 The 4004
 4-bit data path
 1972 – Intel - 8008
 8-bit microprocessor based on the 4004
 fIrst microprocessor to use a compiler
 Specific application microprocessors
Microprocessor
1974 -truly general purpose
microprocessor
8080 -8-bit device - 4,500 transistors
& astonishing 200,000 operations
per second
After 1974, development
exploded
Computer Software and
Personal Computer (PC)
Until mid 1970s
 Development led by hardware
 Computers were designed and software was
designed to fit the hardware.
Personal computing industry began
 1976 - Apple I and Apple II microcomputer
were unveiled
 1981 - IBM joined the PC wars
3 Major Players
 IBM
 Gary Kildall - Developed the first PC operating
system
 Bill Gates - Developed the Disk Operating
System (DOS).
The Development of the
Internet
 Internet based on 4 technologies
 Telegraph
 Telephone
 Radio
 Computers
 Originated from the early work of J.C.R.
Licklider
 Conceptualized a global interconnected set of
computers
 Concept for communication between network nodes
 Packets instead of circuits
 Enabled computers to talk to each other.

 1961 - Kleinrock
 Published first work on packet switching theory
The Development of the
Internet
Two additional important projects
Donald Davies and Roger Scantleberg
Coining the term packet
Connected computer in Boston with
one in Los Angels
Low speed dial-up telephone line
created the first working Wide Area
Network
1967 Roberts - publishing the first plan
for ARPANET
1968 - team, lead by Frank Heart and
included Bob Kahn, developed IMP
ARPNET

 Began as tool for defense contractors

 Universities added
 Government joined
 Other countries joined
 ARPANET ceased to exist in 1989
 Internet was an entity to itself
Development World Wide Web

Beginning concepts - Tim Berners-

Lee’s 1989
 Proposal called HyperText and CERN
 Enable collaboration between physicists &
researchers in the high energy physics research
Three new technologies were
incorporated.
 HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
 hypertext concepts- to be used to write
web documents
 HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) a protocol
Used to transmit web pages between hosts
Web browser client software program to
receive and interpret data and display
results.
Development World Wide
Web
Proposal included a very important
concept for the user interface
 Consistent across all types of computer
platforms
 Enable users to access information from any
computer.
 Line-mode interface was developed &
named at CERN in late 1989
Development World Wide Web
 Growth
 Central computer at CERN with few web pages in 1991
 50 world wide by 1992
 720,000 by 1999
 Over 24 million by 2001
 1993 - graphic user interface browser
 Mosaic
 Popularized and fueled growth of internet
Emergence of the Social &
Ethical Problems in Computing
 The Emergence of Computer Crimes
 Perhaps started with the invention of the computer
virus
 The term virus is derived from a Latin word virus
which means poison
 Computer virus
 Self-propagating computer program
 Designed to alter or destroy a computer system resource
 Spreads in the new environment
 Attacks major system
 Weakens the capacity of resources to perform
 1972 – virus used to describe piece of
unwanted computer code
Growth of Computer
Vulnerabilities
The Case for Computer
Ethics Education
 What is Computer Ethics
 James H. Moore
 First coined the phrase "computer ethics“
 Computer ethics is the analysis of the nature and social
impact of computer technology and the corresponding
formulation and justification of policies for the ethical use of
such technology .
 Definition focuses on the human actions
 Study, an analysis of the values of human actions
influenced by computer technology.
 Computer influence on human actions is widespread
throughout the decision making process preceding
the action
 Education we study the factors that influence
the decision making process
Why You Should Study
Computer Ethics

 Central task of computer ethics

 determine what should be done
 Especially whenever there is a policy vacuum
 Vacuums caused by the ‘confusion’
between the known policies and what is
presented
 Professionals unprepared to deal
effectively with the ethical issues
 Can stop the vacuums
 Can prepare the professionals
Schools of Thought

 Study computer ethics as remedial moral education

 Computer ethics education not as a moral education
but as a field worthy of study in its own right
 Justification for First Thought

 We should study computer ethics

because doing so will make us
behave like responsible
professionals.
 We should study computer ethics
because doing so will teach us how
to avoid computer abuse and
catastrophes.

Material taken from Walter Manner in “Is Computer Ethics Unique?”

Justification for Second Thought
 We should study computer ethics because
the advance of computing technology
will continue to create temporary policy
vacuums.
 We should study computer ethics
because the use of computing
permanently transforms certain ethical
issues to the degree that their alterations
require independent study.
 We should study computer ethics
because the use of computing
technology creates, and will continue to
create, novel ethical issues that require
special study.
 We should study computer ethics because
the set of novel and transformed issues is
large enough and coherent enough to
define a new field

Material taken from Walter Manner in “Is Computer Ethics Unique?”