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2000 BCE
Mesopotamia
The abacus (plural abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool that was in use in Europe, China and Russia, centuries before the adoption of the written Hindu–Arabic numeral system. The exact origin of the abacus is still unknown. Today, abacuses are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone, or metal. -
500 BCE
Precolombia
Mesoamerican calendars are the calendrical systems devised and used by the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica. Besides keeping time, Mesoamerican calendars were also used in religious observances and social rituals, such as for divination. The existence of Mesoamerican calendars is known as early as ca. 500 BCE, with the essentials already appearing fully defined and functional. These calendars are still used today in the Guatemalan highlands, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico. -
John Napier
The bones of Napier, also known as rods or sticks of Napier, were invented by the inventor of the logarithms to perform multiplications, divisions and square roots. Napier's bones consist of an individualized and particular version of the multiplication tables. -
Wilhem Schickard
The calculating clock or also called the Schickard machine is an automatic machine created in 1623 by the German mathematician William Schickard. -
Edmund Wingate
The slide rule, also known colloquially in the United States as a slipstick,is a mechanical analog computer.[3][4][5][6][7] The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as exponents, roots, logarithms and trigonometry, but typically not for addition or subtraction. Though similar in name and appearance to a standard ruler, the slide rule is not meant to be used for measuring length or drawing straight lines -
Blaise Pascal
Pascal's calculator (also known as the arithmetic machine or Pascaline) is a mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal in the early 17th century. Pascal was led to develop a calculator by the laborious arithmetical calculations required by his father's work as supervisor of taxes in Rouen.[2] He designed the machine to add and subtract two numbers directly and to perform multiplication and division through repeated addition or subtraction. -
Sir Samuel Morlan
Samuel Morland invents the first multiplying machine in the court of King Charles II of England. The apparatus consisted of a series of wheels, each of which represented tens, hundreds, etc. Unlike the pascalina, this apparatus did not have automatic advance of columns.
First machine (see photo below) is a simple addition device, similar to the Italian "The Cyclograph" by Tito Livio Burattini, produced at the end of the 1650s -
Wilhelm Leibniz
Arithmetic is a branch of mathematics that consists of the study of numbers, especially the properties of the traditional operations on them—addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Arithmetic is an elementary part of number theory, and number theory is considered to be one of the top-level divisions of modern mathematics, along with algebra, geometry, and analysis. -
Joseph Jacquard
A punched card or punch card is a piece of stiff paper that can be used to contain digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Digital data can be used for data processing applications or, in earlier examples, used to directly control automated machinery. -
Charles Babbage
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a simpler mechanical computer. -
Ada Lovelace
In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer and the future Prime Minister of Italy, transcribed Babbage's lecture into French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842. -
George Boole
In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is the branch of algebra in which the values of the variables are the truth values true and false, usually denoted 1 and 0 respectively. -
Herman Hollerith
The tabulating machine was an electromechanical machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on punched cards. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the machine was developed to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. Later models were widely used for business applications such as accounting and inventory control. It spawned a class of machines, known as unit record equipment, and the data processing industry. -
Leonardo Torres Quevedo
The objective of the machine was the objection in a continuous way and the automatic of the values of the polynomial functions. Being an analog machine, the variable can go through any value (prefixed). For example, before a polynomial equation, by turning all the wheels representative of the unknown, the final result in the sum of the variable terms, when this sum coincides with the value of the second member, the wheel of the unknown will mark a root. -
Ejercito aleman
The Enigma machines are a series of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines, mainly developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries, most notably Nazi Germany before and during World War II. -
Vannevar Bush
The differential analyser is a mechanical analogue computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration.It was one of the first advanced computing devices to be used operationally. The original machines could not add, but then it was noticed that if the two wheels of a rear differential are turned, the drive shaft will compute the average of the left and right wheels. -
Alan Turing
In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine that can simulate an arbitrary Turing machine on arbitrary input. The universal machine essentially achieves this by reading both the description of the machine to be simulated as well as the input thereof from its own tape. Alan Turing introduced the idea of such a machine in 1936–1937.