UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY

Tuguegarao City

School of Criminology
Second Semester, S.Y. 2020
--2021

Course Code : CRIM E2

Course Title : LIVING IN THE IT ERA

PRELIM PERIODIC COVERAGE

MODULE No. 02
TITLE: 4 BASIC COMPUTING PERIODS
INTRODUCTION Information technology has been around for a long, long
time. There are 4 main ages that divide up the history
of information technology. Only the latest age
(electronic) and some of the electromechanical age
really affects us today, but it is important to learn
about how we got to the point we are at with technology
today.
LEARNING ➢ Describe the insight about the 4 basic computing
OUTCOMES periods of computer.
➢ Explain how machine changes the worlds into digital
and virtual reality.
➢ Classify the different discoveries during
premechanical, mechanical, electro-mechanical and
electronic age.
LEARNING 1. Name the different personages/inventors and their
OBJECTIVES contributions in the development of computer.
2. Identify the machines that were developed and made a
remarkable contribution in the development of the
modern computer.
3. Appreciate the major contributions of some experts in
the improvement of computer.
4. Demonstrate the value of teamwork, patience and
sharing in doing the given activity.

Discussion/Situational analysis/Content Etc.:

Computing Periods

Four basic periods, each characterized by a principal technology used to

solve the input, processing, output and communication problems of the time:

A. Premechanical
B. Mechanical
C. Electromechanical
D. Electronic

A. The Premechanical Age: 3000 B.C. - 1450 A.D.

1. Writing and Alphabets. The first humans communicated only through speaking
and picture drawings. In 3000 B.C., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (what is

Page 1
 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

School of Criminology
Second Semester, S.Y. 2020
--2021

today southern Iraq) devised a writing system. The system, called "cuneiform"
used signs corresponding to spoken sounds, instead of pictures, to express
words. From this first information system — writing — came civilization as
we know it today. The Phoenicians around 2000 B.C. further simplified writing
by creating symbols that expressed single syllables and consonants (the
first true alphabet). 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. For the Sumerians, input technology consisted of a pen
like device called a stylus that could scratch marks in wet clay. About 2600
B.C., the Egyptians discovered that they could write on the papyrus plant,
using hollow reeds or rushes to hold the first "ink" - pulverized carbon or
ash mixed with lamp oil and gelatin from boiled donkey skin. Other societies
wrote on bark, leaves, or leather. The Chinese developed techniques for
making paper from rags, on which modern-day papermaking is based, around 100
A.D.

3. Books and Libraries: Permanent Storage Devices. Religious leaders in

Mesopotamia kept the earliest "books" a collection of rectangular clay
tablets, inscribed with cuneiform and packaged in labeled containers — in
their personal "libraries." The Egyptians kept scrolls - sheets of papyrus
wrapped around a shaft of wood. Around 600 B.C., the Greeks began to fold
sheets of papyrus vertically into leaves and bind them together. The
dictionary and encyclopedia made their appearance about the same time. The
Greeks are also credited with developing the first truly public libraries
around 500 B.C.

4. The First Numbering Systems. The Egyptians struggled with a system that
depicted 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.
The first numbering systems similar to those in use today were invented
between 100 and 200 A.D. by Hindus in India who created a nine-digit numbering
system. Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was developed. It was through
the Arab traders that today's numbering system — 9 digits plus a 0 — made
its way to Europe sometime in the 12th century.

5. The First Calculators. The existence of a counting tool called the abacus,
one of the very first information processors, permitted people to "store"
numbers temporarily and to perform calculations using beads strung on wires.
It continued to be an important tool throughout the Middle Ages.

B. The Mechanical Age: 1450 – 1840

1. The First Information Explosion. Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany,

invented the movable metal-type printing process in 1450 and sped up the
process of composing pages from weeks to a few minutes. The printing
press made written information much more accessible to the general public
by reducing the time and cost that it took to reproduce written material.

Page 2
 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

School of Criminology
Second Semester, S.Y. 2020
--2021

The development of book indexes (alphabetically sorted lists of topics

and names) and the widespread use of page numbers also made information
retrieval a much easier task. These new techniques of organizing
information would become valuable later in the development of files and
databases.

2. Math by Machine. The first general purpose "computers" were actually

people who held the job title "computer: one who works with numbers."
Difficulties in human errors were slowing scientists and mathematicians
in their pursuit of greater knowledge.

3. Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.

a. Slide Rule. In the early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English

clergyman, invented the slide rule, a device that allowed the user to
multiply and divide by sliding two pieces of precisely machines and
scribed wood against each other. The slide rule is an early example of
an analog computer — an instrument that measures instead of counts.

b. Pascaline. Blaise Pascal, later to become a famous French

mathematician, built one of the first mechanical computing machines as
a teenager, around 1642. It was called a Pascaline, and it used a
series of wheels and cogs to add and subtract numbers.

c. Leibniz's Machine. Gottfried von Leibniz, an important German

mathematician and philosopher (he independently invented calculus at
the same time as Newton) was able to improve on Pascal's machine in
the 1670s by adding additional components that made multiplication and
division easier.

4. Babbage's Engines

a. The Difference Engine. An eccentric English mathematician named

Charles Babbage, frustrated by mistakes, set his mind to creating a
machine that could both calculate numbers and print the results. In
the 1820s, he was able to produce a working model of his first attempt,
which he called the Difference Engine (the name was based on a method
of solving mathematical equations called the "method of differences").
Made of toothed wheels and shafts turned by a hand crank, the machine
could do computations and create charts showing the squares and cubes
of numbers. He had plans for a more complex Difference Engine but was
never able to actually build it because of difficulties in obtaining
funds, but he did create and leave behind detailed plans.

b. The Analytical Engine. Designed during the 1830s by Babbage, the

Analytical Engine had parts remarkably similar to modern-day computers.
For instance, the Analytical Engine was to have a part called the
"store," which would hold the numbers that had been inputted and the

Page 3
 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

School of Criminology
Second Semester, S.Y. 2020
--2021

quantities that resulted after they had been manipulated. It was also
to have a part called the "mill" - an area in which the numbers were
actually manipulated. Babbage also planned to use punch cards to direct
the operations performed by the machine — an idea he picked up from
seeing the results that a French weaver named Joseph Jacquard had
achieved using punched cards to automatically control the patterns that
would be woven into cloth by a loom.

c. Augusta Ada Byron. She helped Babbage design the instructions that
would be given to the machine on punch cards (for which she has been
called the "first programmer") and to describe, analyze, and publicize
his ideas. Babbage eventually was forced to abandon his hopes of
building the Analytical Engine, once again because of a failure to find
funding.

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. Technologies that form the basis

for modern-day telecommunication systems include:

a. Voltaic Battery. The discovery of a reliable method of creating and

storing electricity (with a voltaic battery) at the end of the 18th
century made possible a whole new method of communicating information.

b. Telegraph. The telegraph, the first major invention to use

electricity for communication purposes, made it possible to transmit
information over great distances with great speed.

c. Morse Code. The usefulness of the telegraph was further enhanced by

the development of Morse Code in 1835 by Samuel Morse, an American from
Poughkeepsie, New York. Morse devised a system that broke down
information (in this case, the alphabet) into bits (dots and dashes)
that could then be transformed into electrical impulses and transmitted
over a wire (just as today's digital technologies break down information
into zeros and ones).

d. Telephone and Radio. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone

in 1876. This was followed by the discovery that electrical waves travel
through space and can produce an effect far from the point at which
they originated. These two events led to the invention of the radio by
Marconi in 1894.

Page 4
 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

School of Criminology
Second Semester, S.Y. 2020
--2021

2. Electromechanical Computing

a. Herman Hollerith and IBM. By 1890, Herman Hollerith, a young man

with a degree in mining engineering who worked in the Census Office in
Washington, D.C., had perfected a machine that could automatically sort
census cards into a number of categories using electrical sensing
devices to "read" the punched holes in each card and thus count the
millions of census cards and categorize the population into relevant
groups. The company that he founded to manufacture and sell it
eventually developed into the International Business Machines
Corporation (IBM).

b. Mark 1. Howard Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, decided

to try to combine Hollerith's punched card technology with Babbage's
dreams of a general-purpose, "programmable" computing machine. With
funding from IBM, he built a machine known as the Mark I, which used
paper tape to supply instructions(programs) to the machine for
manipulating data (input on paper punch cards), counters to store
numbers, and electromechanical relays to help register results.

D. The Electronic Age: 1940 - Present

1. First Tries. In the early 1940s, scientists around the world began to
realize that electronic vacuum tubes, like the type used to create
early radios, could be used to replace electromechanical parts.

2. Eckert and Mauchly.

a. The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes,

the ENIAC. John Mauchly, a physicist, and J. Prosper Eckert, an
electrical engineer, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at
the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the U.S. Army, developed the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) in 1946. It could
add, subtract, multiply and divide in milliseconds and calculate the
trajectory of an artillery round in about 20 seconds.

b. The First Stored-Program Computer. A problem with the ENIAC was that
the machine had no means of storing program instructions in its memory
- to change the instructions, the machine would literally have to be
rewired. Mauchly and Eckert began to design the EDVAC - the Electronic
Discreet Variable Computer -to address this problem. John von Neumann
joined the team as a consultant and produced an influential report in
June 1945 synthesizing and expanding on Eckert and Mauchly's ideas,
which resulted in von Neumann being credited as the originator of the
stored program concept. Maurice Wilkes, a British scientist at
Cambridge University, completed the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Calculator) two years before EDVAC was finished, thereby
taking the claim of the first stored-program computer.

Page 5
 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

School of Criminology
Second Semester, S.Y. 2020
--2021

c. The First General-Purpose Computer for Commercial Use. Eckert and

Mauchly began the development of a computer called UNIVAC (Universal
Automatic Computer), which they hoped would be the world's first
general-purpose computer for commercial use, but they ran out of money
and sold their company to Remington Rand. A machine called LEO (Lyons
Electronic Office) went into action a few months before UNIVAC and
became the world's first commercial computer.

3. The Generations of Digital Computing. Information technology has

traditionally been broken down into four or five distinct stages or computer
generations, each marked by the technology used to create the main logic
element (the electronic component used to store and process information)
used in computers during the period.

References:

➢ Kenneth C. Laudon, Carol Guercio Traver, Jane P. Laudon, Information

Technology and Systems.
➢ http://informationtechnoluogy.blogspot.com/#:~:text=Four%20basic%20pe
riods%2C%20each%20characterized,Electromechanical%2C%20and

Prepared by:

IT Instructors

Page 6