Four Basic Period of Computer History Premechanical Age

Four Basic Period of Computer History

• Pre-mechanical Age • Mechanical Age • Electromechanical Age • Electronic Age

Pre-Mechanical Age (3000 B. C. - 1450 A. D. )

Writing and Alphabets • Petroglyths (signs or simple figures carved in rock)

Petroglyths

Cave painting from Lascaux, France (15, 000 -10, 000 B. C. )

• Ideographs (symbols to represent ideas and concept)

Mayan Ideograph

• Cuneiform – the first true written language and the first real information system. (coonay-eh-form) • Star – heaven or God

Cuneiform

• At around 2000 BC the Phoenicians created symbols that expressed single syllables and consonants (the first true alphabet) • Greek adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels • Romans gave the letters Latin name to create the alphabet we use today.

Papers and pens • Sumerians – stylus and wet clay • Egyptians – papyrus plants (2600 BC) • Chinese – made paper from rags (100 AD)

Stylus and wet clay Papyrus Plant

Chinese

Books and Libraries (permanent storage device) • Mesopotamia – religious leaders kept the earliest book • Egyptians – kept scrolls • Greeks – (600 BC) fold sheets of Papyrus vertically into leaves and bind them together.

First Numbering System • Egyptian – Vertical lines (|)for numbers 1 – 9 - U or O – 10 - coiled rope – 100 - lotus blossom for 1000 • Hindus – (100 – 200 AD) 9 digit numbering • 875 AD the concept of zero was developed.

The First Calculator • Abacus – was man’s first recorded adding machine. Invented in Babylonia and popularized in China.

Mechanical Age (1450 – 1840)

First Information Explosion • Johann Guttenberg – Movable metaltype printing process in 1450.

The first general purpose computers • John Napier – (1614) a Baron of Merchiston, Scotland invented LOGS (Logarithm). • LOGS – allows multiplication and division to be reduce in addition and subtraction. • 1614 – Arabian Lattice – lays out a special version of the multiplication tables on a set of four-sided wooden rods. (multiply, divide large numbers and find square and cube root)

Napier’s Bone John Napier

• Wilhelm Shickard – 1623 - (Professor at University of Tubingen, Germany) – invented the first mechanical calculator that can work with six digits and can carries digits across columns.

• William Oughtred – (1575 – 1660) invented the slide rule.

• Blaise Pascal (1642) – invented the Pascaline. (made of clock gears and levers) that could solve mathematical problems like addition and subtraction.

• Gottfried Leibniz – (1617) invented Stepped Reckoner that could multiply 5 digit and 12 digit numbers yielding up to 16 digit numbers. Stepped Reckoner

• Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1801) developed the automatic loom (weaving loom) that was controlled by punched cards.

• Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar -1820 – developed Arithmometer (the first mass produced calculator)

• Charles Babbage – invented the difference engine (1821) and analytical engine (1832). - Father of modern computer. Difference Engine Analytical Engine

• Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace Byron – 1842 – the first computer programmer.

Electromechanical Age (18 -40 1940)

The Beginning of Telecommunications • Voltaic Battery – first electric battery known as voltaic pile - invented by Alessandro Volta

• Telegraph Samuel F. B. Morse – conceived of his version of an Electromagnetic Telegraph (1832)

Morse Code

• Telephone and Radio Alexander Graham Bell – 1879 - developed the first working telephone.

Guglielmo Marconi – 1894 – (RADIO) discovered that electrical waves travel through space and can produce and effect far from the point at which it originated.

• George Boole – 1852 – developed the binary algebra known as Boolean Algebra

Electromechanical Computing • Pehr and Edward Scheutz – 1853 completed a Tabulating Machine, capable of processing fifteen digit numbers, printing out result and rounding off to eight digits.

Dorr Felt – 1885 – devises the comptometer, a key driven adding and subtracting calculator. Comptograph containing a built in printer Comptometer Comptograph

Herman Hollerith – father of information processing. Punched Card – provided computer programmers with a new way to put information into their machines. He founded the Tabulating Machine Company , later became the Computer Tabulating Recording Company and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)

Herman Hollerith Tabulating Machine

Otto Shweiger – 1893 – invented the first efficient four function calculator called Millionaire.

Lee de Forest – 1906 – developed vacuum tubes This is important for it provided electrically controlled switch.

Electronic Age (1941 – present) Konrad Zuse – 1941 – built the first programmable computer called Z 3.

Howard Aiken – 1942 – developed Mark I the first stored program computer.

John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry – 1942 – completed the first all electronic computer called ABC or Atanasoff-Berry Computer John Atanasoff Clifford Berry