Some Highlights of the Development of the Computer from BC to 1950

3000 - 500 BC

Abacus

Manipulating numbers has been an onerous chore since the development of commerce. Interestingly, the first attempt to automate calculations involved the fingers. The next attempt to solve this problem was the development of the abacus. Whether you find that the inventors were the Greeks and Romans, or the Chinese depends on your source as does the date they first appeared. There is even evidence that late in the first millennium the Aztecs were using an abacus (Fernandes, 1997). Using an abacus a skilled operator could add, subtract, multiply and divide very rapidly. Records show that on November 12, 1946, the champion abacus operator of Japan defeated a man using an electric calculating machine (Kojima, 1997). The abacus, however has several disadvantages over an electric calculator. For one, it requires considerable training. Moreover, the real disadvantage of the abacus is that the operator must perform his calculations mentally. All the abacus does is store the results step by step.

Slide Rule

The next attempt to ease the task of calculations was in the early 1630's when in England William Oughtred made a slide rule by inscribing logarithms on wood (Kempf, 1961). Slide rules are based on the principle that it is possible to multiply and divide by using logarithms and addition and subtraction Modern day computers still make use of this principle. Like the abacus, however, the use of slide rules is not intuitive (Museum of HP Calculators, 1998).

Pascaline

The next advance came when Blaise Pascal at age 18 built the first Pascaline, a mechanical device that could add and subtract. Subtracting, however, was accomplished by adding 99984. The machine, called a Pascaline, had 8 movable dials to add sums up to 8 figures long. As one dial moved ten notches (a complete revolution), it triggered the next dial to move one notch forward and so on (Computers: History and Development, 1997). Although his genius was admired and a watch maker tried to steal his idea, his invention was never accepted. To honor his accomplishment a programming language popular in the 1980's was named after Pascal.

Binary
system

Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz improved on the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply (Computers: History and Development, 1997). He also introduced the binary system, a numerical system based on two. Although humans still use numbers based on 10, computers use the binary system.

Weaving Machine

Joseph Marie Jacquard creates a weaving machine using punch cards that was used to weave intricate silk patterns (Greene, 1985). Employees at the mill where it was built, fearful of losing their jobs, rioted, broke apart the machine, and sold the parts. Despite this beginning, this invention was a commercial success because it introduced a cost effective way of producing goods.

Arithometer

Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, building on von Leibniz's ideas creates the Arithometer, a machine that can add, subtract, divide and multiply. By now people were ready to use a calculator and this calculator was widely used up until the First World War (Computers: History and Development, 1997).

Difference Engine &
Analytical Engine

Charles Babbage works on his difference and analytical engines, neither of which was ever finished. A brilliant mathematician, his interest was sparked when as an astronomer he found errors in the astronomical tables that he was using Greene, 1985). He felt that such errors could be avoided only with machine calculations. At first he had the support of the British government, but when the difference engine had cost and time overruns, support waned.

Despite this, the real beginnings of computing as we know it today can be traced to Babbage (Computers: History and Development, 1997). It was he who noticed the parallel between machines and mathematics; machines perform repeated tasks without mistakes and mathematics is the simple repetition of steps.

Building further on the work of von Leibniz, Boole further explained the binary system and developed what has come to be called Boolean algebra (or arithmetic), or the fact that any mathematical equation can be stated as either true or false. Boolean arithmetic is used today in searching databases including bibliographic data bases.

Punch
cards

Herman Hollerith applied the Jacquard loom concept to computing in an effort to find a faster way to compute the US Census (Computers: History and Development, 1997). The 1880 census had taken almost seven years to count and the Bureau feared that with the expanding population it would take at least 10 years to count the 1890 census. Using Hollerith's machine the census takers compiled the results in just six weeks. In 1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company which after a series of mergers in 1924 became IBM™.

The origin of the Year 2000 problem began with these cards (Randall, 1997). They were limited in the data they could store by the number of columns. To save space they decided to omit the century. Punch card technology was not widespread in 1900 so this omission caused few problems. Because this system worked well and storage was still expensive (even through the early 1990's), serious efforts were not made to rectify this until about 1995. The difficulty occurred because computers were not be able to distinguish between the year 2001 and 1901. This may not seem like a problem until one realizes that computers do "date arithmetic," that is they can subtract or add a given number of days from dates, or determine the number of days between dates.

Vannevar Bush develops a calculator for solving differential equations that have long confounded scientists and mathematicians. This device was used during WW II to calculate artillery firing tables.

Mark I

IBM in 1937 gave half a million dollars and lent some of its best engineers to work at Harvard University with Howard H. Aiken to build a new kind of calculating machine (Shelly & Cashman 1980). The result, the Mark I, was donated to Harvard. When completed it was about 150 feet long and contained about 500 miles of wiring (Computers: History and Development, 1997). The machine took three to five seconds per calculation. Despite this success, at this time Thomas J. Watson, Sr., then head of IBM felt that only eight to ten of these machines would be needed and that few businesses would be able to use them (Shelly & Cashman 1980).

ENIAC

First Generation
Computers

At the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania a partnership with the US Government lead to the development of the first electronic computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

(ENIAC). This massive machine consisted of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 computers resistor and 5 million soldered joints (Moye, 1996). It consumed enough energy to dim the lights in an entire section of Philadelphia. It was however, 1000 times faster than the Mark I and reduced the time spent calculating artillery firing tables. A 60 second trajectory took a skilled person with a desk calculator 20 hours while ENIAC required only 30 seconds for the same task.

Many years of accumulated devices and knowledge led to the development of ENIAC. It was dedicated February 15, 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, but then moved to the Aberdeen, MD Proving Grounds to be used in the Cold War (Greene, 1985). It's major characteristic was that it had no movable parts. It used vacuum tubes and electronic relays. Computers that use vacuum tubes are said to be "first generation computers." They had limited storage and primarily used punch cards or magnetic tape to input data and programs. ENIAC is remembered as the world's first computer and was featured in 1996 when the 50th anniversary of computing was celebrated.

Transistor

The transistor is invented by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain (Berg, & Whirl, 1996). The transistor was smaller than vacuum tubes, generated less heat, did not burn out and started the move to second generation computers.