A History of Information Technology and Systems

 Four basic periods, each characterized by a principal technology used to solve the input, processing,
output and communication problems of the time:
1. Premechanical,
2. Mechanical,
3. Electromechanical, and
4. 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 today southern Iraq) devised a writing system. The system, called
"cuniform" 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 penlike 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. 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 teenage, 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 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.

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 tor 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.
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 Four 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.

a. The First Generation (1951-1958). The first generation of computers used vacuum tubes as their main logic
elements; punched cards to input and externally store data; and rotating magnetic drums for internal storage of data
in programs written in machine language (instructions written as a string of 0s and 1s) or assembly language (a
language that allowed the programmer to write instructions in a kind of shorthand that would then be "translated"
by another program called a compiler into machine language).

b. The Second Generation (1959-1963). AT&T's Bell Laboratories, in the 1940s, discovered that a class of
crystalline mineral materials called semiconductors could be used in the design of a device called a transistor to
replace vacuum tubes. Magnetic cores (very small donut-shaped magnets that could be polarized in one of two
directions to represent data) strung on wire within the computer became the primary internal storage technology.
Magnetic tape and disks began to replace punched cards as external storage devices. High-level programming
languages (program instructions that could be written with simple words and mathematical expressions), like
FORTRAN and COBOL, made computers more accessible to scientists and businesses.

c. The Third Generation (1964-1979). Individual transistors were replaced by integrated circuits — thousands of
tiny transistors etched on a small silicon chip. Magnetic core memories began to give way to a new form, metal
oxide semiconductor memory (MOS), which, like integrated circuits, used silicon-backed chips. Increased memory
capacity and processing power made possible the development of operating systems — special programs that help
the various elements of the computer to work together to process information. Programming languages like BASIC
were developed, making programming easier to do.

d. The Fourth Generation (1979- Present). The fourth generation of computers used large-scale and very large-
scale integrated circuits (LSIs and VLSICs), containing hundreds of thousands to over a million transistors on a
single, tiny chip, and microprocessors that contained memory, logic, and control circuits (an entire CPU) on a
single chip. Microprocessors and VLSICs helped fuel a continuing trend toward microminiaturization where
semiconductor memories increased memory size and speed at every decreasing prices. Personal computers, like
the Apple and IBM PC, were introduced and quickly became popular for both business and personal use. Fourth
generation language software products such as Access, Lotus 1-2-3, Word for Windows, and many others allowed
persons without any technical background to use a computer.

Kenneth C. Laudon, Carol Guercio Traver, Jane P. Laudon, Information Technology and Systems.