The History of ICT

Key stages in the development of the modern computer

Pre-mechanical computing
 Usage of ‘manual computers’ – worked by hand
 The abacus – 1st manual computer, used as a basic calculator
 5 000 yrs ago – early Babylonians – used simple arithmetic to
count and keep a record of their goods
 5 beads per line
 Developed to speed up addition
Pre-mechanical computing
 Early 17th century – Napier’s Bones
 Created to speed up multiplication
 A series of numbers written on narrow strips of
material, originally bone
Mechanical computing
 1st mechanical calculators by Blaise Pascal in France
in 1645
 The Pascaline – a hand-powered adding machine
which could add numbers up to 8 figures long
 Used gears and cogs to transfer the results of one
wheel to another; used to calculate taxes
 The same principle is still used today in electricity
and gas meters
The Pascaline
Mechanical computing
 Charles Babbage – the Difference Engine – the birth of
modern computing
 Very complex and difficult to manufacture
 The Analytical Engine – mechanical computer, steam-
driven, never built
 Cryptographer – broke a number of codes
 Ada Lovelace – the world’s 1st programmer
 By the end of the 19th ct, many of these principles were
still being used in the tabulating machine which used
punched cards to process data from the US Census.
Mechanical computing
 In 1801 – Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a
weaving machine or loom – controlled by a set of
cards with holes in them – these cards introduced
the principle of programmability
 Punched cards were used for more than 150 yrs
Weaving machine by Jacquard Loom
Computers in WW2
 UK – Turing broke German code using Colossus – 1st
electronic computer
 It was analogue, used valves and relays
 Innovative eg. paper tape input
 Enormous impact on war
Alan Turing’s Colossus (1943)
Electronic computing
 UNIVAC – 1st American commercial computer
 It used 5200 vacuum tubes performing 2000
operations per second
 In 1947 transistor was invented by Shockley, Brattain
and Bardeen
 Silicon, obtained from sand, material used in modern
electronic components
 Little power, small
The 1st transistor (1947)