Chapter I

A Brief
History of
Computers
Introduction
The development of modern computer technology has
been made possible by
 Human Nature
 Technological Advances
 Theoretical Advances
This presentation takes a brief look at the human
journey from prehistory to today with the focus on
the development of the theory and practise of
computing
Natural Patterns & Counting
 People notice patterns : this is how we learn from infancy.

 The first primitive counting mechanisms were developed to

keep track of and predict seasons etc using the patterns
observed in movement of the Sun, Moon, Stars etc.

 Early counting devices included notches on sticks, knots in

string and marks on walls.
Magic & Counting
 The ability to accurately predict natural events was a source
of power in early human society.

 People who could do so would strengthen their claim to

supernatural privilege and/or power.

 Record keeping was needed to help in accurate predictions

and transmission of knowledge.

 Markings on antlers and bones indicate that people made

notations of the phases of the moon as long as 30,000 years
ago and suggest that the cave rituals and other cultural
practices had a seasonal or periodical orientation.
Monumental Calendars
 The monumental structure,
Stonehenge, was built in
prehistoric England about
2800 BCE.

 Stonehenge is oriented
towards equinoxes, solstices
and lunar eclipses during
the equinox.

 This suggests usage as a

complex permanent
calendar.

 Stonehenge is just one of

many similar monuments.
Early Counting Devices

 6000 B.C. [ca]: Ishango bone type of

tally stick in use

 40001200 B.C.: Inhabitants of the

first known civilization in Sumer keep
records of commercial transactions on
clay tablets.

 These tablets are more than 4500

years old, from the dawn of civilised
urban existence and they deal with
accounts and tax records! (Taxes and
death are always with us)
 Towards Mechanising calculations:
The Abacus
 The Abacus are the earliest
known counting/calculation
instruments.

 Used to aid mental calculations

 3000 BCE: The abacus is

invented in Babylonia

 Used by Greeks and Romans

 Refined to suit counting system

of each culture

 Abacus were also developed by

Native American cultures
Towards Mechanising calculations:

Chinese Abacus
Chinese used and refined abacus
technology over a long period
Chinese abacus (or suanpan): very
efficient suanpan techniques have
been developed to do
multiplication, division, addition,
subtraction, square root and cube
root operations at high speed.
The Hindu Zero and Place Value

The Hindu civilisation of India was alone among the

ancients in developing a usable representation for
numbers (about 2000 years ago)
They also developed the concept of ZERO and with
it the idea of place value.
This enabled them to develop a high degree of skill
in algebra.
These concepts are critical to the binary system used
in modern computers
What is a “Computer”?
 Origins of the word ‘computer’
 1646; applied to people whose job involved calculating
(computing).
 These people generated highly accurate logarithmic tables,
trigonometric tables, actuarial tables for insurance companies,
gunnery tables for the army and navy, tables to predict the
tides, the movement of the planets, all without the aid of any
significant mechanical device.
 Modern Definition of a Computer
 A computer is an automatic electronic abacus. Some early
computers used ten switching elements per numeral, but a
modern computer is a binary abacus.
Towards Mechanising calculations: Other aids
to calculation
Logarithms (Logarithmic Tables)
Date from the 16th century
John Napier, invented and publicized a system of
"logarithms" which allowed multiplication and
division to be reduced to addition and subtraction.

Napier’s Bones represent an application of the old

Arabic lattice method of multiplication. The bones
consist of a series of numbered rods, each inscribed
with a multiplication table. The rods were usually made
of ivory or bone, hence the name.

Slide Rule: in 1621, an English mathematician and

clergyman called William Oughtred used Napier's
logarithms as the basis for the slide rule
This remained an important tool in complex
mathematical calculation until the invention of the
computer.
Towards computers: The First Mechanical
Calculator

The Forefathers of the

Modern Computer

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

(1646-1716)

Blaise Pascal Charles Babbage

(1623-1662) (1812-1833)
 Pascal’s Arithmetic Machine
Pascal's Arithmetic Machine used a series of gears each with ten teeth.
Numbers could be entered and the gear would turn the correct number of teeth.
The gear train then supplied a mechanical answer equivalent to the correct
arithmetic answer. The machine could only add and subtract, while multiplication
and division operations were implemented by performing a series of additions or
subtractions.

NOTE:
In fact the Arithmetic Machine could
really only add, because subtractions
were performed using complement
techniques, in which the number to
be subtracted is first converted into
its complement, which is then added This gear train system is still
to the first number. Interestingly used by mechanical
enough, modern computers employ odometers
similar complement techniques.
[Known as 2’s complement mathematics]
 Leibniz’s Step Reckoner

Leibniz developed Pascal's ideas and, in 1671, introduced the Step

Reckoner, a device which, as well as performing additions and subtractions, could
multiply, divide, and evaluate square roots by series of stepped additions.

Pascal's and Leibniz's devices were

the forebears of today's desk-top
computers, and derivations of these
machines continued to be produced
until their electronic equivalents
finally became readily available and
affordable in the early 1970s.

Leibniz also strongly advocated the use of the binary number system, which is
fundamental to the operation of modern computers.
Charles Babbage: Difference Engine &
Analytical Engine
 In 1822, Babbage proposed building a machine called the
Difference Engine to automatically calculate mathematical
tables. The Difference Engine was only partially completed
when Babbage conceived the idea of another, more
sophisticated machine called an Analytical Engine.
 The Analytical Engine was intended to use loops of
Jacquard's punched cards to control an automatic
calculator, which could make decisions based on the results
of previous computations.
 The Analytical Machine was designed to be stream -driven
and fully automatic rather than requiring the user to
mechanically input all the data as did the Difference
Engine.
 Neither machine was finished because Babbage kept
updating his design.
Babbage’s Conditional Decisions
 The Analytical Machine was also intended to employ several features
subsequently used in modern computers, including sequential control,
branching, and looping.
 The conditional decision meant that the path a calculation would
follow could be altered depending on the answer to the previous step
in the calculation.
 The use of a card system to ‘store’ a program and the development of
the conditional state were significant contributions to the future of
computing

Augusta Ada Lovelace (Lord

Byron’s daughter) worked with
Babbage and created a
program for the Analytical
Machine. She is considered to
be the first programmer
Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating
Machine
 The US government faced a dilemma because using the existing
system collating census data by making tally marks in small
squares on rolls of paper and then adding the marks together by
hand was extremely time consuming.
 If the system remained unchanged, the data from the 1890 census
would not be collated into any useful form until well after the 1900
census.
 During the 1880s Herman Hollerith, an American inventor
decided to use Jacquard's punched cards to represent the census
data, and to then read and collate this data using an automatic
machine. (Apparently, he did not get this idea from Babbage.)
 Hollerith's final system included an automatic electrical
tabulating machine with a large number of clock-like counters
that accumulated the results.
 Operators could instruct the machine to examine each card for
certain characteristics, such as profession, marital status, number
of children, and so on.
The Birth of IBM International Business
Machines)

Hollerith’s system proved to be

both useful and efficient.
 It was only useful for
tabulation not for direct
complex computation.
 Not a ‘real’ computer
The use of perforated or punched
cards for data entry was a
major useful innovation.
In February 1924, Hollerith's
company changed its name to
International Business
Machines, or IBM.
 Punched Cards & Tape
 The original cards had round holes (45 per row by 1900).
 The use of punched cards (and paper tape) for computer
input lasted for many years
 Later cards (about 1929 onwards) used rectangular cards
and had 80 holes per row. (This is the type of computer
card you may have seen since they were around for a long
time.)
 The First Programmable Computer
 Konrad Zuse (a German) built his first computer in 1938
 The Z1 is today considered to be the first freely programmable
computer of the world.
 In 1941 the Z3 (an improvement on Z1) was released.
 It was fully programmable and able to solve complex
engineering equations.
 The Z3 was the first machine designed to work on the binary
system.
 Perforated, discarded movie film was used for input.
WWII - Reading Enemy Secrets

 Colossus developed by British

Military Intelligence to assist
in code breaking

 First digital, electronic,

programmable computer

 1500 electronic valves

(vacuum tubes)

 Kept secret for 50 years

 WWII - ENIAC
 Was developed by [USA]
Army Ordnance to
compute World War II
ballistic firing tables.
 Early electronic digital
computer
 1,800 Vacuum tubes
 ENIAC could discriminate
the sign of a number,
compare quantities for
equality, add, subtract,
multiply, divide, and
extract square roots.
ENIAC stored a maximum
of twenty 10-digit decimal
numbers.
 Harvard Mark I
 Officially known as the IBM
automatic sequence controlled
calculator (ASCC)
 Brainchild of Howard H. Aiken
 The Mark I was constructed out of
switches, relays, rotating shafts, and
clutches, and was described as
sounding like a "roomful of ladies
knitting." The machine contained
more than 750,000 components, was
50 feet long, 8 feet tall, and weighed
approximately 5 tons!
 Instructions were read in on paper
tape, data was provided on punched
cards, and the device could only
perform operations in the sequence
in which they were received.
 Digital Computer Basics
Digital computers are essentially formed by connecting a lot of
switches together.
 Each switch can be considered to be ON or OFF.
 The ON/OFF state of the switches can be modified as
required,
 Combinations of switches can be used to implement
primitive logical functions, which can in turn be used to
realize more complex logical functions
Advances in technology have lead to significant reductions in the
size of modern computers and significant increases in their
processing speed and memory capacity
Moore’s Law: Moore predicted that the number of transistors
per square inch on integrated circuits would double every 18
months. Most experts expect Moore's Law to hold for at
least another two decades.
Developing Computer Technology Crucial
Inventions
 Mechanical Computers
 Gears & Gear Train
 Punched Cards/Tape
 Relay Switches
 Electronic Computers
 Vacuum Tubes
 Transistors (1947)
 Integrated Circuits (1958)
 Microprocessors
Developing Computer Technology Crucial
Inventions
 Zero
 Place Value
 Logic : Euler ; George Boole ; Augustus De Morgan; John
Venn etc
 (Conditional reasoning and set theory)
 Binary Numbers
 The Turing Machine: Alan Turing: Description of
hypothetical machine
 Von Neumann Machine: John von Neumann: Description
of possible fixed structure for flexible (programmable)
machine
Developing Computer Technology
Important Ideas
 Programming Languages: Grace Hopper: Proposed that
computers could be ’taught’ to read English. Her best-
known contribution to computing was the invention of the
compiler, the intermediate program that translates English
language instructions into the language of the target
computer.
 Teaching computers to ‘read’ natural language remains the
goal of those who design computer languages and create
various programming environments.
1973 AD to 1981 AD The First Personal
Computers (PCs)

 IBM  Apple
 Acorn released PC in  Apple II in 1977
1981  Apple III in 1980
 284-AT in 1984  Lisa in 1983
 Other First computer with
The Altair 8800 (MITS mouse and graphical
became Microsoft) in user interface before this
1975 computers used
TRS-80 (Radio Shack) command line (typed
1977 text) input
Commodore PET 1980  Macintosh in 1984
Osborne I in 1981
Email, Internet & WWW
• Since 1984 bigger, better, faster and ever cheaper computers
that are easier to use and increasingly available to all.
• Development of Internet & Web technologies
• Almost instantaneous communication between computers
• Readily accessible stores of online documents
Selected “History of Computers”
links
 Page of links for History of Computers:
http://www.hitmill.com/computers/computerhx1.html

 History of Computers Timeline (with links)

http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm

 The Evolution of Computational Machines

 (Frame timeline with links: from pre-history to today)

http://www.maxmon.com/history.htm

 About the Abacus

http://www.answers.com/topic/abacus