1.2.1 Brief History

• 1200s—Manual Calculating Devices

• 1600s—Mechanical Calculators

• 1800s—Punched Cards

• 1940s—Vacuum Tubes

• 1950s—Transistors

• 1960s—Integrated Circuits (IC)

• 1970s to Present—Microprocessor

• Pace of Advancement

As commerce developed in earlier societies, people began to realize the need for a bookkeeping system to enable them to add, subtract, and record simple transactions. To facilitate the bookkeeping process, counting devices were developed. At first, people used fingers, stones, and sticks to count. Later on, mechanical calculators emerged, but they were slow and bulky. When electricity was discovered, electronic components replaced the bulky mechanical parts and enabled smaller, faster computing devices. Computers are continually evolving towards faster computations, increased storage capacity, and smaller size, while maintaining their affordability.

With advancements in computing devices, the uses of computers have gone beyond the scope of commerce and they are integral to many aspects of our lives. Purchases are processed through computers. Products are designed using computers. Movies are made with computer simulations. The growth of the computing industry is driven by the numerous ways computing technology can be applied in areas such as commerce, communications, banking, and education. In the next section, we will discuss how computer technology can be used.

We will begin our discussion on how computers developed by examining periods in time characterized by its pioneering research to bring computing to solve data-intensive or compute-intensive problems. You will see how computing methods advanced to where we are today.

1200S—Manual Calculating Devices

Manual calculating devices required the use of hands to move components on the device.

The first calculation device, the abacus, was used in China. It involved manually moving beads to do calculations. Below is a picture of an abacus.

Figure 1 Abacus

1600S—Mechanical Calculators

Mechanical calculators used wheels, gears, and counters.

1642: Blaise Pascal invented the Pascaline, which is a mechanical calculator. The machine used some principles of the abacus, but used wheels to move counters.

1800S—Punched Cards

Punched cards use holes following a specific pattern to represent the instructions given to the machine or stored data. The idea of storing data and program instructions on punched cards came from the Jacquard loom. It used pasteboard cards with patterns of punched holes to produce mass quantity of fabrics weaved in a variety of patterns. Each punched card represents a pattern and the punched card can be fed through the Jacquard loom to produce weaved fabrics of the pattern repeatedly. Similarly, different program instructions can be stored on separate punched cards, which can be fed through the computing machine repeatedly. Using punched cards, program instructions and data can be stored.

1834: Charles Babbage designed a new general-purpose calculating device, the Analytical Engine, which is the ancestor of modern computers. It included the essential components of present-day computers, which are input, process, storage, and output of data.

Babbage's assistant, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of English poet Lord Byron, would create the instruction routines stored on punched cards to tell the machine what to do. Instruction routines used by the computer are known as "computer programs." She is thus the first female computer programmer, and in her honor, the U.S. Defense Department named the programming language ADA.

Below is an image of an analytical engine.

Figure 2 Analytical engine

1890: Herman Hollerith designed an electronic punched card tabulating device that enabled the U.S. Census Bureau to tabulate the 1890 census in six months, which would have otherwise taken more than 7 years. Hollerith’s machine used punched cards to store data instead of instruction routines.

1896: Hollerith thought the business world could benefit from the electronic punched card tabulating device, and founded Tabulating Machine Company, which later became International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924.