Computer History

Presented byFrank H. Osborne, Ph. D.

© 2005

ID 2950Technology and the Young Child

The Abacus• The abacus emerged about 5000 years

ago in Asia Minor.• It uses a series of beads to make

calculations. In some parts of the world it is still in use today.

Early Inventors• Early workers pioneered the concepts

that made the modern day computer possible

• Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)• Gottfried von Leibnitz (1646-1716)• Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834)• Charles Babbage (1791 - 1871)

Blaise Pascal• Pascal was a

mathematician.• He developed a

machine called the Pascaline in 1642.

• The machine was used to make calculations.

Blaise Pascal• It used a series of gears

where a single gear with 10 teeth engaged a one-tooth gear. The one-tooth gear would turn 10 times to make the 10-tooth gear revolve once.

• It did addition and subtraction. The Pascaline

Gottfried von Liebnitz

• Liebnitz was a German philosopher.

• He improved on Pascal's machine by making one that could also multiply and divide.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard

• Jacquard was a silk weaver.

• He designed a loom that controlled the weaving using cards with holes punched in them.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard

• The punched cards are sewn together to make a long strip alongside the loom.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard

• Three Jacquard punch cards.

Charles Babbage

• Babbage was an inventor.

• Among his inventions are the speedometer and the cow catcher.

Charles Babbage

• Babbage designed a machine called the "difference engine."

• The idea was to perform repeated calculations mechanically.

Charles Babbage• He later designed an

"analytical engine" that also ran on punched cards like those used on the Jacquard loom. Only part of it was ever built.

Augusta Ada King• Augusta Ada King,

Countess of Lovelace (1815 - 1842) was the daughter of Lord Byron.

• She served as Babbage's assistant and helped secure British Government funding for it.

Augusta Ada King

• She is sometimes considered to be the first computer programmer.

• In the 1980s the US Department of Defense named the ADA programming language after her.

Herman Hollerith

• Herman Hollerith (1860 - 1929) was an engineer.

• His idea was to use punched cards to store data. These were used well into the 20th century.

Herman Hollerith

• Hollerith invented a tabulating machine to perform the 1890 census.

• He then formed the Tabulating Machine Company which became IBM in 1924.

Konrad Zuse

• Konrad Zuse (1910 - 1995) developed the first general purpose program controlled computer.

• It used telephone relay switches to make on/off decisions.

Konrad Zuse

• He tried to get funding from the German government in World War II but was denied.

• His work did not become generally known until much after the war.

ENIAC

• ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer)

• Developed by John W. Mauchly (1907-1980) and J. Presper Eckert, Jr. (1919-1995) at the University of Pennsylvania.

• It did calculations using circuits containing vacuum tubes that were about 1000 times faster switches than telephone relays.

ENIAC

• ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer)

Vacuum Tube

Transistor

• The Transistor was invented in 1948. It replaced the vacuum tubes in radios, televisions and computers.

• Transistor computers were smaller and faster than the earlier models.

Microprocessor

• The microprocessor is a series of transistors and electronic circuits etched onto a chip of silicon.

• The first one was invented in 1958 by Jack St. Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments.

The rest of the story

• This led to the development of the microcomputer that is so familiar to us today.

• Apple, Radio Shack, Commodore, IBM and others developed microcomputers during the latter part of the 20th century.

The End