A Brief History of Computers

Pre-Mechanical Computing:

From Counting on fingers

to pebbles
to hash marks on walls
to hash marks on bone
to hash marks in sand
Interesting thought:
Do any species, other than homo sapiens, count?
 Mechanical computers

From
The Abacus
c. 4000 BCE
to
Charles Babbage
and his Difference Engine (1812)
 Mechanical computers:
The Abacus (c. 3000 BCE)
Napier’s Bones and
Logarithms (1617)

Picture courtesy IBM

Oughtred’s (1621) and
Schickard‘s (1623]
slide rule
 Blaise Pascal’s
Pascaline (1645)
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz’s
Stepped Reckoner (1674)
Joseph-Marie Jacquard and his punched
card controlled looms (1804)
Preparing the cards with the pattern
for the cloth to be woven
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
The Father of Computers
Charles Babbage’s Difference
Engine
Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine
Lady Augusta AdaCo
untess of Lovelace
Read Lady Augusta Ada’s translation of Menabrea’s
Sketch of the Analytical Engine
Electro-mechanical computers

From
Herman Hollerith’s
1890
Census Counting Machine
to
Howard Aiken
and the Harvard Mark I (1944)
 Herman Hollerith and his
Census Tabulating Machine (1884)
A closer look at the Census
Tabulating Machine
 The Harvard Mark I (1944)
aka IBM’s Automatic Sequence
Controlled Calculator (ASCC)
The first computer bug
Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Mur
ray Hopper
Electronic digital computers

From
John Vincent Atanasoff’s
1939
Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
to
the present day
Alan Turing1
912-1954
The Turing Machine
Aka
The Universal Machine
1936
John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995)

Physics Prof
At
Iowa State
University,
Ames, IA
Clifford Berry (1918-1963)

PhD student
of
Dr. Atanasoff’s
 1939
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)

The ABC was the first electronic digital computer, invented

by John Vincent Atanasoff
 1943
Bletchley Park’s Colossus

The Enigma
Machine
 1946
The ENIAC

John Presper Eckert

(1919-1995)
and
John Mauchly
(1907-1980)
of the
University of
Pennsylvania Moore
School of Engineering
 The ENIAC:
Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer
Programming the ENIAC
 ENIAC’s Wiring!
John Von Neumann

John Von Neumann came up with the

bright idea of using part of the computer’s
internal memory (called Primary Memory)
to “store” the program inside the computer
and have the computer go get the
instructions from its own memory, just as
we do with our human brain.
 1951
Univac
Typical 1968 prices—EX-cluding maintenance & support!
 “What hath God wrought!”
(first telegraph message sent by Samuel Morse,, 1844)
1844

Electronic and computing technology quickly progressed—at an ever-accelerating pace

—

from vacuum tubes (Lee de Forrest,, the

the audion,
audion, 1907)
1907
to transistors (William Shockley et al.. 1947)
1947)
to semiconductors (Jack Kilby && Robert Noyce,, 1958)
1958
to microprocessors (M.E. “Ted” Hoff,, 1971)
1971
to networking and the Internet (Vinton Cerf && Robert Kahn,, 1982]
1982
to the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee,, 1991)
1991
and beyond…

Whatever next?…
Acknowledgements (continued on next slide)
For one of the best written books on the history of computers, check out
Engines of the Mind : The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors -- by Joel N. S
hurkin (Paperback)

A movingly beautiful book on Alan Turing is Alan Turing: the Enigma, by Andrew Hodges

An excellent, readable book on Cryptography is Simon Singh’s

THE CODE BOOK. The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking

Tutorials on the encryption software PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) can be found at
http://www.pitt.edu/~poole/PGPintro.htm

All pictures and some of the information were obtained from various sites on the World Wide Web.
Complete list follows:

Abacus: http://qi-journal.com/action.lasso?-Token.SearchID=Abacus&-Response=culture.asp
Napier: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Napier.html
http://www.maxmon.com/1600ad.htm
Slide Rules: http://www.hpmuseum.org/sliderul.htm
Pascal’s Pascaline: http://www.thocp.net/hardware/pascaline.htm
Leibnitz Stepped Reckoner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepped_Reckoner
Jacquard looms: http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/jacquard1.html
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/ausstell/meister/e_web.htm
Acknowledgements (continued)
Charles Babbage: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Babbage.html
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/babbage/index.asp
Lady Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace: http://www.well.com/user/adatoole/bio.htm
http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
Electricity: http://www.mediaeng.com/historyelect.html (beautifully written pocket history of
electricity & magnetism)
Herman Hollerith: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hollerith.html
Howard Aiken & The Harvard Mark I: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Aiken.html
Alan Turing: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Turing.html
John Vincent Atanasoff: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/books/mollenhoff/overview.shtml
Biographies of Atanasoff and Clifford Berry: http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/Biographies.html
J. Presper Eckert: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Eckert_John.html
John Mauchly: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Mauchly.html
The patent controversy: http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwm7.html
ARPANet: http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa.html

Thanks to the following EDTECH listserv colleagues and friends who have reviewed the presentation
and provided amendments and additional material for inclusion on the slides and in the notes.

Nancy Head, online instructor, Michigan Virtual High School (MVHS), U.S.A., on the web at
www.mivhs.org

Mandi Axmann, Instructional Designer, Open Universities Australia