A Brief History of Computers

A Brief History of Computers By Bernard John Poole, MSIS Associate Professor of Education and Instructional Technology University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown Johnstown, PA 15904 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 Ada Countess 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 Murray Hopper Electronic digital computers From John Vincent Atanasoff’s 1939 Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) to the present day Alan Turing 1912-1954 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) 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 ENIAC’s Wiring! Programming the ENIAC 1951 Univac Typical 1968 prices—EX-cluding maintenance & support! What God hath wrought… (first message sent by Henry Morse) From vacuum tubes (Lee de Forrest) to transistors (Shockley et al.) to semiconductors (Kilby &Noyce) to microprocessors (Hoff) to networking and the Internet (Vinton Cerf] to the World Wide web (Tim Berners-Lee) and beyond… 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. Shurkin (Paperback) A movingly beeautiful 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.angelfire.com/ego/philster/sliderule/main.html Pascal’s Pascaline: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Pascal.html Leibnitz Stepped Reckoner: http://www-groups.dcs.standrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Leibniz.html 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/ 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 http://miranda.dc.turkuamk.fi/~jk3975/hollerith/ Howard Aiken & The Harvard Mark I: http://www-groups.dcs.standrews.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 http://www.fht-esslingen.de/studentisches/Computer_Geschichte/grp3/atanberr.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 http://www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/manuscripts/MS599.html ARPANet: http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa.html Acknowledgements (continued) 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) on the web at www.mvhs.org