History of Computer

The first counting device started to be used by the primitive people. These are the
sticks and stones. As technology improves and human minds develop more and
more computing devices are invented and developed.

The first computer is really the people. “Computer” then was a job title. Computer
was used to describe human beings especially women whose job is to perform
repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigation tables, tide
charts, and planetary positions for almanacs.

Humans can be sometimes ineffective and inaccurate and computing multiplications

for long hours can be so boring. Hence, mistakes in computations will arouse. That’s
why inventors made researches to find ways in computing easier with the aid of
machines.
A typical computer operation back when
computers were people
ABACUS
Abacus is an ancient instrument used in
performing arithmetic calculations. It can do add,
subtract, multiply and divide. It consists of tablet
or frame bearing parallel wires or grooves in
which the counters or beads are moved. For a
skilled user of abacus he could perform addition
and subtraction in the same speed with the person
using an electronic computer. However,
multiplication and division are much slower.

It is not in China that abacus was really invented .

The oldest surviving abacus was used 300 B.C by
the Babylonians. Until now, China, Japan and Korea
are still using the abacus.
A modern abacus. Abacus is just a representation of the human fingers: the
5 lower rings in each rod represent the 5 fingers and the upper rings
represent the 2 hands.
NAPIER’S BONES
Invented by a Scottish named John Napier . He first invented the logarithms in 1617
and he got the idea from printed tables. From the printed tables he made an
alternative wherein logarithms values are carved on ivory sticks .
SLIDE RULE
A slide rule can do very difficult calculations engineers and architects were using it
before in calculations. Three men developed the slide rule and they were Edmund
Gunter, William Oughtred, and Robert Bissaker. It was in 1632 when slide rule was first
built in England. It was used in the 1960s by engineers of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo
programs which landed men on moon.
*HP-35 Scientific Calculator
Leonardo da Vinci made had drawn
gear-driven calculating machines but
had never built any.
SCHICKARD’S CALCULATING CLOCK
In 1623, German Professor, Wilhelm
Schickard built this first gear-driven
calculating device. However this device got
little publicity for its inventor died because
of the outbreak of bubonic plague in the
Mediterranen.
PASCALINE
At the age of 19, Blaise Pascal invented the Pascaline
in 1642 for his father who is a tax collector. He had
built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator,
which only performs addition. But he wasn’t able to
sell the device because of its high cost and
inaccuracy.

Pascaline uses complicated arrangement of

numbered wheels connected by gears. Pascal
continually develop his machine until it can already
perform subtraction and addition up to nine digits
long.
This is the pascalline
opened up with gears
and cylinders which
rotated to show the
numerical result
STEPPED RECKONER
Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz is a German
mathematician who discovered the fundamental
principles in infinitesimal calculus.

In 1672, Leibniz invented a calculating machine

which he called the stepped reckoner. He called it a
stepped reckoner for instead of using gears like
Pascal it has fluted drums with ten flutes arranged
around their circumference in a stair-step fashion. It
is capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying,
dividing , and extracting roots. The device uses the
decimal number system.
JACQUARD’S LOOM
In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard , a French inventor
developed the power loom. The Jacquard’s loom works by
using wooden punched cards held together in a rope to
program patterns in order to create woven fabrics. The
presence or absence of each hole in the card physically
allows a colored thread to pass or stop the thread.

A close up of a Jacquard
punched card
Jacquard’s Loom
DIFFERENCE ENGINE
Charles Babbage designed this steam driven
calculating machine about the size of the room.
The machine intended to solve tables of numbers,
such as logarithm tables which was use in
navigations. The difference engine should be
capable or calculating 20-decimal capacity of
solving mathematical problems.

The machine was greatly funded by the British

government to be used by the Navy. Unfortunately,
even though a lot of money was put into the
completion of the machine it was never been
finished.
This is only a small section of
Babbage’s difference engine
ANALYTICAL ENGINE

Again, Charles Babbage conceived a new machine, called the analytical engine.
He got the mechanism of Jacquard’s loom. The punched card technology was used
in this machine and Babbage improved it. The analytical engine is programmable,
it is as large as a house with 6 steam engines. It is capable of performing
mathematical calculations, storing information by using punched cards as a
permanent memory. This machine also uses conditional statement to perform
calculations.

Babbage befriended Ada Byron for the fashioning programs of the Analytical
engine. However when Ada had already made plans and notes for the machine,
Babbage refused to publish his ideas. The British government refused to fund
Babbage’s machine and remain unbuilt. It was only in 1833 that the machine was
constructed but then only a part of it was finished.
LADY ADA AUGUSTA BYRON KING
She is the very first computer programmer. A daughter of the famous poet Lord
Byron. She became the Countess Lady Lovelace. At the age of 19, she already
got interested in Babbage’s ideas of the Analytical Engine. Ada and Babbage
had communicated through letters and meetings and had studied for the
programming of the engine. She wrote a series of notes wherein she detailed
sequences of instructions she had prepared for the analytical engine.
HOLLERITH’S TABULATING
MACHINE
Herman Hollerith, an American engineer who invented
the Hollerith desk. He used the same idea in Jacquard’s
loom. The machine consisted of a card reader which
sensed the holes in the card, a gear driven mechanism
which could count using Pascal’s mechanism and a
large wall of dial indicators to display the result of the
count.

Hollerith’s invention was used in the 1890 U.S. Census .

Hollerith’s desk made computational time faster. He
developed the Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company
which was later changed in 1924 by the name
International Business Machines(IBM).
 The Hollerith's desk
The operator working with
the Hollerith's desk
Women preparing punched cards for the U.S. Census
One of Hollerith’s desk still existing today
Hollerith’s tabulating
machine was the very first
machine to be on the cover
of a magazine
 IBM-HARVARD MARK I
Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a
partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944.

 This was the first programmable digital

computer made in the U.S.
 But it was not a purely electronic computer.
Instead the Mark I was constructed out of
switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches.
The machine weighed 5 tons, incorporated
500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and
51 feet long, and had a 50 ft rotating
shaft running its length, turned by a
5 horsepower electric motor.

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BAGUIO CAMPUS HISTORY OF COMPUTING
 IBM-HARVARD MARK I
Primary programmers for the Mark I was,
Grace Hopper.
Hopper found the first computer "bug":
a dead moth that had gotten into the Mark I
and whose wings were blocking
the reading of the holes in the paper tape.
The word "bug" had been used to describe
a defect since at least 1889
but Hopper is credited with coining the word
"debugging" to describe the work to
eliminate program faults.
In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language,
"Flow-matic". This language eventually became COBOL
which was the language most affected by the infamous Y2K problem. That ‘s why
It’s called the millenium bug C”,)

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BAGUIO CAMPUS HISTORY OF COMPUTING
 ENIAC/EDVAC (Von Neumann model of computing)
ENIAC

 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator)

ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by
two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert.
 ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more
than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC
employed paper card readers obtained from IBM

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BAGUIO CAMPUS HISTORY OF COMPUTING
 Apple 1

The Apple 1 which was

sold as a do-it-yourself kit
(without the lovely case seen here)

Typical wiring in an early

mainframe computer
[photo courtesy
The Computer Museum]

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BAGUIO CAMPUS HISTORY OF COMPUTING
 ENIAC was unquestionably the origin of the U.S. commercial computer industry,
but its inventors, Mauchly and Eckert, never achieved fortune from their work and
their company fell into financial problems and was sold at a loss.

IBM's hire an unknown but aggressive firm called Microsoft to provide the
software
for their personal computer (PC).
This contract allowed Microsoft to grow so dominant that by the year 2000 their
market capitalization (the total value of their stock) was twice that of IBM
and they were convicted in Federal Court of running an illegal monopoly.

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BAGUIO CAMPUS HISTORY OF COMPUTING
 MODERN COMPUTERS

The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe computer [photo courtesy of IBM]

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BAGUIO CAMPUS HISTORY OF COMPUTING
• Is a scientific calculator considered as a
computer?
• Who is the father of modern automatic
computation?
• Who is the Father of modern computer?
• Explain Y2K bug/Millennium Bug. Give 1 real
life problem scenario caused by this bug.