computer histery

By dawson3099

  • A more modern abacus.

    A more modern abacus.
    In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition.

  • Schickard's Calculating Clock

    Schickard's Calculating Clock
    The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the calculating clock.

  • A slide rule

    A slide rule
    Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

  • A more modern set of Napier's Bones

    A more modern set of Napier's Bones
    Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

  • A Pascaline opened up so you can observe the gears and cylinders which rotated to display the numerical result

    A Pascaline opened up so you can observe the gears and cylinders which rotated to display the numerical result
    In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the "hanging chad" from the Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000?).

  • abacus

    abacus
    The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians

  • The DEC PDP-12

    The DEC PDP-12
    By 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns.

  • The Zuse Z1 in its residential setting

    The Zuse Z1 in its residential setting
    Zuse's third machine, the Z3, built in 1941, was probably the first operational, general-purpose, programmable (that is, software controlled) digital computer.

  • ENIAC Invented

    ENIAC Invented
    The ENIAC was the first digitel computer and cost almost $500,000. The macanic was the size of a small gym .

  • The original IBM Personal Computer (PC)

    The original IBM Personal Computer (PC)
    Computers had been around for 20 years before the first microprocessor was developed at Intel in 1971.