Computers now and today

Computers have been around for more than 200 years. Mechanical calculators were created in
the 19th century to address the growing complexity of number-crunching problems, initially
imagined by mathematicians and businesspeople. By the turn of the 20th century, technological
advancements had made it possible for computers to become bigger and more sophisticated.

Computers nowadays are hardly recognisable from 19th-century inventions like Charles
Babbage's Analytical Engine or even from the enormous machines that took up entire rooms in
the 20th century like the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.

Here is a brief history of computers, from their early days of manual computation to the potent
devices of today that browse the Internet, play games, and stream multimedia.

1801: French businessman and inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard creates a loom that weaves
fabric patterns automatically using punched wooden cards. Punch cards comparable to those
used in early computers.

English mathematician Charles Babbage imagines a steam-powered calculator that could

compute tables of numbers in 1821. According to the University of Minnesota, the British
government-funded effort known as the "Difference Engine" fails as a result of the era's
inadequate technology (opens in new tab).

Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and the poet Lord Byron's daughter, creates the first
computer program in 1848. Lovelace is translating a paper on Babbage's Analytical Engine from
French to English when she types the first program, claims Anna Siffert, a professor of
theoretical mathematics at the University of Münster in Germany. Siffert said in an essay for The
Max Planck Society, "She also gives her own comments on the text, which turn out to be three
times as long as the real transcript (opens in new tab). Lovelace also offers a detailed
explanation for computing Bernoulli numbers using Babbage's machine, which is essentially an
algorithm. In this way, she becomes the world's first computer programmer.