The History of Computers (From 3000BC to 1954)

The evolution of the technologies that have brought upon the modern computing era. Many inventions have taken several centuries to develop into their modern forms and modern inventions. 

 

ABACUS (3000BC)

Abacus

 

3000 BC with the Chinese Abacus, how is this related to Computing you ask? The abacus was one of the first machines humans had ever created to be used for counting and calculating.

 

THE PASCALINE(1642)

The Pascaline

 

Fast forward to 1642 and the Abacus evolves into the first Mechanical adding machine, built by mathematician and scientist, Blaise Pascal. This first mechanical calculator, The Pascaline, is also where we see the first signs of technophobia emerging, with mathematicians fearing the loss of their jobs due to progress.

 

STEPPED RECKONER (1671)

 

Stepped Reckoner

Also in the 1671, we meet Gottfried Leibniz. A pioneer in many fields, most notably known for his contributions to mathematics and considered by many the first computer scientist. Inspired by Pascal, he created his own calculating machine, Stepped Reckoner, able to perform all four arithmetic (+,-,×,÷) operations.

 

ANALYTICAL ENGINE (1834)

Babbage's Analytical Engine

In 1834, we are met with Charles Babbage. Babbage is known as the father of the computer, with the design of his mechanical calculating engines. In 1834, Babbage started work on making the Analytical Engine. Elaborating on the difference engine, this machine would be able to execute operations in non-numeric orders through the addition of conditional control, store memory and read instructions from punch cards, essentially making it a programmable mechanical computer.

 

CENSUS TABULAR (1890)

Census Tabular

With the inspiration from Babbage, American inventor Herman Hollerith designed one of the first successful Electromechanical Machines, referred to as the Census Tabulator. This machine would read U.S. census data from punched cards, up to 65 at a time, and tally up the results. Hollerith's tabulator became so successful he went on to found his own firm to market the device, this company eventually became IBM. To input data to the punched card, you could use a keypunch machine AKA, the first iteration of a keyboard!

 

TURING MACHINE (1936)

Turing Machine

In 1936, Alan Turing proposed the concept of a universal machine, later to be dubbed the Turing machine, capable of computing anything that is computable. Up to this point, machines were only able to do certain tasks that the hardware was designed for. The concept of the modern computer is largely based off Turing ideas.

  

 THE Z3 (1938-1941)

The Z3 Computer

Also starting in 1938, German engineer, Konrad Zuse, invented the world's first programmable computer. This device read instructions from punched tape and was the first computer to use boolean logic and binary to make decisions, through the use of relays. For reference, boolean logic is simply logic that results in either a true or false output, or when corresponding to binary, one or zero.

THE Z4 (1942)

The Z4 Computer

 In 1942, with the computer the Z4, Zuse also released the world's first commercial computer. For these reasons many consider Zuse the inventor of the modern-day computer.

HORWARD MARK I (1939-1944)

Horward Mark I

In 1939, Howard Aiken with his colleagues at Harvard and in collaboration with IBM began work on the, Harvard Mark 1 Calculating Machine, a programmable calculator and inspired by Babbage's analytical engine. This machine was composed:

·         1 million parts.

·         Had over 500 miles of wiring

·         Weighted nearly 5 tons.

The Mark 1 had 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal digits. It could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second, a multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds and a logarithm or trig function took about 1 minute.

ATANASOFF-BERRY COMPUTER (ABC) (1937-1942)

ABC

Beginning in 1937 and completing in 1942, the first digital computer was built by John Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry, the computer was dubbed the ABC. Unlike previously built computers like those built by Zuse, the ABC was purely digital - it used vacuum tubes and included binary math and boolean logic to solve up to 29 equations at a time.

THE COLOSSUS COMPUTER (1943)

The Colossus Computer

In 1943, the Colossus was built in collaboration with Alan Turing, to assist in breaking German crypto codes, not to be confused with Turing's bombe that actually solved Enigma. This computer was fully digital as well, but unlike the ABC was fully programmable, making it the first fully programmable digital computer.

ENIAC (1946)

ENIAC

In 1946, the Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer AKA the ENIAC was completed. It was composed of nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes and large enough to fill an entire room, the ENIAC is considered the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer. It was somewhat programmable, but like Aikens Mark 1 was a pain to rewire every time the instruction set had to be changed. The ENIAC essentially took the concepts from Atanasoff's ABC and elaborated on them in a much larger scale. Meanwhile the ENIAC was under construction, in 1945, mathematician John von Neumann, contributed a new understanding of how computers should be organized and built, further elaborating on Turing's theories and bringing clarity to the idea from computer memory and addressing. He elaborated on conditional addressing or subroutines, something Babbage had envisioned for his analytical engine nearly 100 years earlier.

 

EDVAC (1944)

EDVAC

Von Neumann assisted in the design of the ENIAC’s successor, the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer aka the EDVAC, which was completed in 1950 and the first stored-program computer. It was able to operate over 1,000 instructions per second. He is also credited with being the father of computer virology with his design of a self-reproducing computer program. And it contains essentially those things which the modern computer has in it. 

TRADIC (1954)

 

TRADIC

In 1947, the first silicon transistor was invented at Bell Labs and by 1954 the first transistorized digital computer was invented, aka the TRADIC. It was composed of 800 transistors, took the space of .085 cubic meters compared to the 28 the ENIAC took up, only took 100 watts of power and could perform 1 million operations per second.