History of Computer Science

Mechanical Inventions

Before 1900s

Antikythera• 80 B.C.E.

navigational aid• predicted motion of

stars and planets

Other Early Inventions

• Abacus

• Astrolabe (one below dated 1212 A.D.)

John Napier

1614 Napier “bones” calculate logarithms

Blaise Pascal• Mechanical adding machine (1642-

1645), the “pascaline”

“First” Calculating Machine• Originally credited

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1671)

, ,

• Wilhelm Schickard invented one in 1623 to calculate ephemerides

Joseph-Marie Jacquard

• Jacquard loom used punched cards for patterns in weaving silk (1801)

First Computer Graphics?

Charles Babbage• Difference engine:

calculate trigonometric and logarithmic tables (1823-1834), completed 1991

• Analytical engine: precursor to modern computer (~1834, never built)

• Broke Vigenère cipher

Ada Lovelace• Interested in

Babbage’s Analytical engine

• First “programmer”algorithm program

William Stanley Jevons• 1869 “Logic Piano”

solved Boolean logic problems (syllogisms) faster than could be done by hand– ~ 3 feet tall– keys (logical operations)

+ levers + letters– press keys and

appropriate letters appear showing the result

Herman Hollerith

• Punched cards for US 1890 census data (saved $5 Mil and several years of processing time)

• Tabulating Machine Company IBM

Ideas Advance in Mathematics

1900-1940s

Russell & Whitehead• 1910-1913 Write Principia Mathematica,

which attempted to construct the foundations of mathematics on a rigorous logical basis.

Bertrand Alfred North Russell Whitehead

Leonardo Torres y Quevedo

• 1911-1913: Built some electro-mechanical calculating devices, including one that played simple chess endgames against a human.

David Hilbert

(1) Is mathematics complete? Can every mathematical statement be either proved or disproved?

(2) Is mathematics consistent? Is it true that statements such as "0 = 1" cannot be proved by valid methods?

(3) Is mathematics decidable? Is there a mechanical method that can be applied to any mathematical assertion and (at least in principle) eventually tell whether that assertion is true or not?

1928

Kurt Gödel

• Answered Hilbert’s first two questions in 1931

Alan Turing• 1936 Answered Hilbert’s

last question (as did Alonzo Church) and proved the Halting Problem

• 1936 Turing Machine• Breaking Enigma – 1939-40 “bombes”

(secret until 1970)

• 1950 Turing test for AI

1941 Konrad Zuse

• Developed the “Z3”

• first operational, general-purpose, program-controlled calculator

1944 Howard Aiken

• 1943: Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (renamed Harvard Mark I) for simple arithmetic.

• Used by US Navy for ballistics and gunnery calculations

1946 ENIAC vs Pentium

• 5000 +/second

• stores 200 digits

• 10ft tall, 1800 ft.2, 30 tons

150MHz 16Mb RAM IBM ThinkPad 755 CX:

• 150x106 +/second

• stores 16x106 digits

• 11.7”x8.3”, 6.1 lbs

[ENIAC considered first electronic digital computer (Mauchly & Eckert) until info. on Colossus released in 1970]

1944 EDVAC

• stored-program electronic computer

• Mauchly, Eckert, and John von Neumann

• Maurice Wilkes builds EDSAC in 1948 (based on EDVAC), first stored-program digital computer

Grace Hopper• Worked with:– 1944: Aiken on

Harvard Mark I– 1949: Eckert and

Mauchly on UNIVAC

• Credited with:– 1951: first

“computer” bug– 1952: first compiler– 1959: COBOL

Hardware Revolutions• 1947: Transistor invented by John

Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley who were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.

• 1949: Jay Forrester invents magnetic core memory

• 1959: Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) and Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor) invent the integrated circuit

1950s Idea Revolutions

• 1956: Edsger Dijkstra develops algorithms for minimum spanning trees and shortest path in a graph

• 1957: FORTRAN by John Backus et. al.

• 1958: – LISP by John McCarthy, – Algol by Alan Perlis, John Backus, Peter

Naur, et. al.

1960s• More programming languages• Fred Brooks: operating systems• Chomsky and Rabin: automata theory• Hoare: program correctness + quicksort• 1968: computer mouse by Engelbart• 1969-1971: Hoff and Faggin (Intel) design first

microprocessor.• Knuth’s 3-volume “The Art of Computer

Programming”• ARPAnet: precursor to Internet

1970s• Major advances in database theory (Codd)• UNIX (Thompson & Ritchie), C (Kernighan

and Ritchie)• RISC architecture• Cray supercomputers• Advances in algorithms and computational

complexity (Karp, Cook)• Public-key cryptosystems (RSA)• Start of Usenet

1980s• Rise of personal computers (Jobs and

Wozniak, founders of Apple)• 1981: – first computer viruses– first successful marketable PC

• 1984: Apple Macintosh• 1987: the US National Science

Foundation starts NSFnet, precursor to part of today's Internet.

1990s

• Parallel computing

• Biological computing e.g. Human Genome Project

• Quantum computing

• Growth of Internet and WWW

• Size/cost decrease and power increase of hardware

• Nano-technology