Computer History

Presented byFrank H. Osborne, Ph. D.

© 2005

Bio 2900Computer Applications in Biology

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