Inventor of First Computer Machine in the World
The abacus,
which emerged about 5,000 years ago in Asia Minor and is still in use today, may
be considered the first computer. This device allows users to make computations
using a system of sliding beads arranged on a rack. Early merchants used the
abacus to keep trading transactions. But as the use of
paper
and pencil spread, particularly in Europe, the abacus lost its importance.
It took nearly 12 centuries, however, for the next significant advance in
computing devices to emerge. In 1642,
Blaise
Pascal (1623-1662), the 18-year-old son of a French tax collector, invented
what he called a numerical wheel calculator to help his father with his duties.
This brass rectangular box, also called a Pascaline, used eight movable dials to
add sums up to eight figures long. Pascal's device used a base of ten to
accomplish this. For example, as one dial moved ten notches, or one complete
revolution, it moved the next dial - which represented the ten's column - one
place. When the ten's dial moved one revolution, the dial representing the
hundred's place moved one notch and so on. The drawback to the Pascaline, of
course, was its limitation to addition.
In 1694, a German mathematician and philosopher,
Gottfried
Wilhem von Leibniz (1646-1716), improved the Pascaline by creating a machine
that could also multiply. Like its predecessor, Leibniz's mechanical multiplier
worked by a system of gears and dials. Partly by studying Pascal's original
notes and drawings, Leibniz was able to refine his machine. The centerpiece of
the machine was its stepped-drum gear design, which offered an elongated version
of the simple flat gear. It wasn't until 1820, however, that mechanical
calculators gained widespread use. Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchman,
invented a machine that could perform the four basic arithmetic functions.
Colmar's mechanical calculator, the arithometer, presented a more practical
approach to computing because it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. With
its enhanced versatility, the arithometer was widely used up until the First
World War. Although later inventors refined Colmar's calculator, together with
fellow inventors Pascal and Leibniz, he helped define the age of mechanical
computation.
The real beginnings of computers as we know them today, however, lay with an
English mathematics professor,
Charles
Babbage (1791-1871). Frustrated at the many errors he found while examining
calculations for the Royal Astronomical Society, Babbage declared, "I wish
to God these calculations had been performed by steam!" With those words,
the automation of computers had begun. By 1812, Babbage noticed a natural
harmony between machines and mathematics: machines were best at performing tasks
repeatedly without mistake; while mathematics, particularly the production of
mathematic tables, often required the simple repetition of steps. The problem
centered on applying the ability of machines to the needs of mathematics.
Babbage's first attempt at solving this problem was in 1822 when he proposed a
machine to perform differential equations, called a
Difference Engine.
Powered by steam and large as a locomotive, the machine would have a stored
program and could perform calculations and print the results automatically.
After working on the Difference Engine for 10 years, Babbage was suddenly
inspired to begin work on the first general-purpose computer, which he called
the Analytical Engine. Babbage's assistant,
Augusta Ada King,
Countess of Lovelace (1815-1842) and daughter of English poet
Lord Byron,
was instrumental in the machine's design. One of the few people who understood
the Engine's design as well as Babbage, she helped revise plans, secure funding
from the British government, and communicate the specifics of the Analytical
Engine to the public. Also, Lady Lovelace's fine understanding of the machine
allowed her to create the instruction routines to be fed into the computer,
making her the first female computer programmer. In the 1980's, the
U.S. Defense Department
named a programming language ADA in
her honor.
Babbage's steam-powered Engine, although ultimately never constructed, may
seem primitive by today's standards. However, it outlined the basic elements of
a modern general purpose computer and was a breakthrough concept. Consisting of
over 50,000 components, the basic design of the Analytical Engine included input
devices in the form of perforated cards containing operating instructions and a
"store" for memory of 1,000 numbers of up to 50 decimal digits long.
It also contained a "mill" with a control unit that allowed processing
instructions in any sequence, and output devices to produce printed results.
Babbage borrowed the idea of punch cards to encode the machine's instructions
from the Jacquard loom. The loom, produced in 1820 and named after its inventor,
Joseph-Marie Jacquard, used punched boards that controlled the patterns to be
woven.
In 1889, an American inventor,
Herman
Hollerith (1860-1929), also applied the Jacquard loom concept to computing.
His first task was to find a faster way to compute the
U.S. census. The previous census in 1880
had taken nearly seven years to count and with an expanding population, the
bureau feared it would take 10 years to count the latest census. Unlike
Babbage's idea of using perforated cards to instruct the machine, Hollerith's
method used cards to store data information which he fed into a machine that
compiled the results mechanically. Each punch on a card represented one number,
and combinations of two punches represented one letter. As many as 80 variables
could be stored on a single card. Instead of ten years, census takers compiled
their results in just six weeks with Hollerith's machine. In addition to their
speed, the punch cards served as a storage method for data and they helped
reduce computational errors. Hollerith brought his punch card reader into the
business world, founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, later to become
International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924
after a series of mergers. Other companies such as
Remington
Rand and Burroughs also manufactured punch readers for business use. Both
business and government used punch cards for data processing until the 1960's.
In the ensuing years, several engineers made other significant advances.
Vannevar Bush
(1890-1974) developed a calculator for solving differential equations in
1931. The machine could solve complex differential equations that had long left
scientists and mathematicians baffled. The machine was cumbersome because
hundreds of gears and shafts were required to represent numbers and their
various relationships to each other. To eliminate this bulkiness,
John V. Atanasoff
(b. 1903), a professor at Iowa State College (now called
Iowa State University) and his graduate
student, Clifford Berry, envisioned an all-electronic computer that
applied Boolean algebra to computer circuitry. This approach was based on the
mid-19th century work of George Boole (1815-1864) who
clarified the binary system of algebra, which stated that any mathematical
equations could be stated simply as either true or false. By extending this
concept to electronic circuits in the form of on or off, Atanasoff and Berry had
developed the first all-electronic computer by 1940. Their project, however,
lost its funding and their work was overshadowed by similar developments by
other scientists.
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