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The evolution of computers began with early mechanical aids like the abacus, which helped simplify counting and basic math operations. Inventors continued developing new devices, including Napier's Bones in 1617 and Blaise Pascal's mechanical Pascaline calculator in 1642. Gottfried Leibniz later extended Pascal's design to perform additional math functions. In the 19th century, Charles Babbage proposed plans for steam-powered mechanical calculators like his Difference Engine, though it was never completed. His unbuilt Analytical Engine later outlined the basic architecture of a modern computer.

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40 views

Assignment

The evolution of computers began with early mechanical aids like the abacus, which helped simplify counting and basic math operations. Inventors continued developing new devices, including Napier's Bones in 1617 and Blaise Pascal's mechanical Pascaline calculator in 1642. Gottfried Leibniz later extended Pascal's design to perform additional math functions. In the 19th century, Charles Babbage proposed plans for steam-powered mechanical calculators like his Difference Engine, though it was never completed. His unbuilt Analytical Engine later outlined the basic architecture of a modern computer.

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Ajay Kumar
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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EVOLUTION OF COMPUTERS

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 need for a device to do calculations along with the growth in commerce and other human activities explain the evolution of computers .having the right tool to perform these tasks has always been important for human beings .in their quest to develop efficient computing devices, many apparatuses were developed .however ,many centuries elapsed before technology was adequately advanced to develop computers. Abacus: In the beginning ,when the task was simply counting or adding ,people used either their fingers or pebbles along lines in the sand .in order to simplify the process of counting, people in asia minor built a counting device called 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. the device allowed users to do calculations using system of sliding beats arranged on a rack. the abacus was simple to operate and was world wide for centuries .in fact it is still used in many countries even today . 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).

With the passage of time, many computing devices such as napiers bones and sliding rule were invented. It took many centuries , however for the next significant advancement in the computing devices . Napiers bones: 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. 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. Pascaline: In 1642,a french mathematician, Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the first automatic calculator .this brass rectangular box .also called as pascaline, used eight movable dials to add some eight figures long . 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. 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. Stepped reckoner : In 1694,german mathematician, gotfried wilhemvon Leibniz extended pascals design to perform multiplication,division and to find square root. This machine is also knwn as steeped reckoner . it was the first massproduced calculating device ,which wsa designed to perform multiplication by repeated addition .like its predecessor, leibenzs mechanical multiplier worked by a system of gears and dials . the only problem with the device was that it lacked mechanical precesion in its construction and was not reliable.

Difference engine: By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine. This machine would be able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. He obtained government funding for this project due to the importance of numeric tables in ocean navigation. By promoting their commercial and military navies, the British government had managed to become the earth's greatest empire. But in that time frame the British government was publishing a seven volume set of navigation tables which came with a companion volume of corrections which showed that the set had over 1000 numerical errors. It was hoped that Babbage's machine could eliminate errors in these types of tables. But construction of Babbage's Difference Engine proved exceedingly difficult and the project soon became the most expensive government funded project up to that point in English history. Ten years later the device was still nowhere near complete, acrimony abounded between all involved, and funding dried up. The device was never finished. In 1883, he quit working on this machine to concentrate on the analytical engine .the basic design of this engine included input devices in the form of perforated cards containing operating instructions and a store fro memory of 1,000 numbers up to 50 decimal digits long. It also contained a control unit that allowed processing instructions in any sequence ,and output devices to produce printed results . babaage borrowed the idea of punch cards to encode the instructions in the machine from the joseph-marie jacquards loom . although the analytical engine was never constructed it outlined the basic elements of a modern computer.

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