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500 BCE
The Abacus
The first counting machine was the counting board, dating back about 3,000 years. More than 1,000 years went by before the “high tech” beads on the wires of the abacus replaced the stones in the column of the counting board. The abacus was the first calculator, and its origin is lost somewhere in Chinese, Arabic, Europe, and Egyptian history.(https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&safe=active&ssui=on#q=when%20was%20the%20abacus%20invented&safe=active&ssui=on) -
Blaise Pascal
The French mathematician Pascal (1632-1662) built the first gear- driven mechanical calculator. Which he name the Pascaline. Blaise Pascal (1623- 1662) spent long hours with his father, a tax official, adding long columns of numbers. After years of this, he decided to try to find an easier way to add the numbers. He became an independent businessman who built and sold 50 of his Pascalines. -
Joseph Jacquard (1752-1834)
A hundred or so years later another Frenchman, Joseph Jacquard built a weaving machine that used punch cards to select the threads to be incorporated into the pattern. He called it the Jacquard Loom. This was a major stepping stone in the history of computers. (https://www.google.com/search?q=blaise+pascal&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=731&site=webhp&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj0_9D9hcbOAhVG8GMKHZPaBgEQ_AUIBSgA&dpr=1&safe=active&ssui=on#safe=strict&q=joseph+jacquard) -
Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace
In 1842, at the age of 27, Ada translated the description of Babbage’s work form French to English. She added some of her own ideas about programming to the translation and corrected Babbage’s errors. Ada Lovelace is credited with developing the programming loop, in which a sequence of operations is repeated within a program. -
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage (1792- 1872) was bored with having to do the figuring by hand. He was also angry about the errors that occurred in the calculations. He decided to do something about it, and designed his analytical engine. -
Dr. Herman Hollerith
He developed the first electrical punch card tabulator. Data were represented by the position of punches on cards that were fed into the tabulator, which then automatically totaled the data from the selected parts of the cards. Hollerith took another major step. He recognized that punched data could be “sorted” to determine how many people had more than two children, or non- English speaking members, or any other attribute on which data had to be collected. -
William Seward Burroughs
It wasn’t until 1886 that William Seward Burroughs invented the commercially successful mechanical adding machine. A million Burroughs Adding and Listing Machines were sold by 1926. It showed to be a major point in computer history. -
Grace Hopper
In 1943 Hopper was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve. She was commissioned a Lieutenant (JG) and was ordered to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. She became the first programmer on the Navy's Mark I computer. -
The Harvard Mark 1
The Harvard Mark 1, as the computer came to be known, became operational in 1944. It was 51 feet long and had 500 miles of wire in it. The Mark 1 used electromechanical device called relays, which consisted of, and electromagnet and switch. The use of the relay was the next big step in the advance of the early twentieth- century computing technology it soon replaced the gear. -
ENIAC
It was designed to be used by the military in WW2, to compute the tables needed to figure the trajectory of and artillery shell. What made the ENIAC so revolutionary was that it didn’t use relays; it used vacuum tubes, electronic switches. The difference is that a vacuum tube could move information at a speed 1,000 times faster than a relay!!(https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&safe=active&ssui=on#q=eniac&safe=active&ssui=on) -
Processor
The processor puts the answer back into a file storage device for permanent storage (that’s when you “save” it) of sends it directly to and output device for immediate use. The processor performs this activity over and over until the desired result is achieved. Both the memory and the processor are electronic – that is they work by sending electrical signals through wires. -
Hardware
The smallest digital computers consist only of the memory and the processor. But larger digital computers are part of systems that also contain input equipment and output equipment. These devices are called hard ware, which is the physical equipment that makes up the computer. -
Software
By itself, computer hardware is useless. Programs are needed to operate the hardware. A program is simply a sequence of instructions that tells a computer what to do. Software is the general term that refers to any single program or group of programs. (https://www.google.com/search?q=hardware&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=775&site=webhp&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiykdSghcbOAhVN8WMKHZdiDrUQ_AUICCgD&safe=active&ssui=on#imgrc=yQEZ__h8DwQmhM%3A) -
Memory
The memory (RAM) receives data and holds them until needed. The memory is made up of a huge collection of switches, or transistors. Memory, also called the internal memory or main memory, stores information and programs inside the computer. (https://www.google.com/search?q=computer+memory&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=731&site=webhp&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjdktf2hsbOAhUOyGMKHX-1B_UQ_AUIBSgA&dpr=1&safe=active&ssui=on) -
Storage
File storage devices, also called auxiliary storage provide long-term storage of large amounts of in formation. Such units are usually slower than the memory that is built into the computer, but they can hold much more information, and they are less expensive. For this reason, file storage devices (hard disk, floppy disk) are commonly used to store large amounts or data, programs, and processed information.
