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logarithms
While addition and subtraction are straight forward, multiplication and division require a great deal more work. These operations were made simpler by the development of the concept of logarithms by the mathematician John Napier in 1614. -
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Blaise pascal
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method. -
mechanical adding machine
In 1642, Blaise Pascal developed a mechanical adding machine that used sets of wheels connected by gears. There was a wheel for each position, the one's column, the ten's and so on. By turning the wheels a number could be entered into the machine. Then by turning the wheels again, a number could be added or subtracted from the first. Carrying and borrowing were taken care of automatically by the gears. Although over fifty of these devices were made, they did not receive wide spread acceptance, e -
multiplication and division done mechanically
Gottfried von Liebnitz, in 1674, devised a method whereby a machine could be made that would mechanically do multiplication and division. -
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Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS, was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Considered a "father of the computer", Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. -
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Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this, she is sometimes considered the world's first computer programmer. -
cash register
in 1850, D.D. Parmalee patented a similar device that worked by pressing keys to turn the wheels and gears in the mechanical adding machine. This was the familiar cash register. When the movement of the gears was electrified, the desk calculator was born. -
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Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith was an American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of one of the companies that later merged and became IBM. -
Differential analyzer
research on this device started in as early as 1836 but was not published until 1876. 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. -
tablet computers
tablet computers also known as tablet pc's are a type of mobile computer usually having a touch screen or pen enabled interface. the first patent for an electronic tablet used for handwriting was granted in 1888. The first publicly demonstrated system using a tablet and handwriting text recognition instead of a keyboard for working with a modern digital computer dates to 1956. -
International Business Machines
Information stored on punched cards was used in the census of 1890 by Herman Hollerith who also borrowed the idea from the Jacquard loom. The stored information was then processed by mechanically collating, sorting, and summing the data. Hollerith was also responsible for the development of the Hollerith Code for encoding alphanumeric information as punched holes in a card. He went on to found International Business Machines. -
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Alan turing
Alan Mathison Turing was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. -
censuscountingmachine
created by harris and ewing, the machine counted census and calculated it. -
PC
A personal computer (PC) is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator. This contrasted with the batch processing or time-sharing models which allowed larger, more expensive minicomputer and mainframe systems to be used by many people, usually at the same time. -
Turing machines
In 1936, Alan Turing showed that any problem can be solved by a machine if it can be expressed as a finite number of steps that can be done by the machine. Computers are therefore sometimes called Turing machines. -
Grace Hopper
One of the giants in the development of high level languages on digital computers was Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) recruited by Aiken in 1943 to be the third programmer of the Mark I -
First computer
Howard Aiken at Harvard University built the world's first computer in 1944. It was called the Mark I or ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator). The Mark I was an electromechanical machine, built to calculate cannon shell trajectories; it used relay switches. Programs and information were input by a punched paper ribbon. Aiken had managed to make the "analytic engine" that Babbage had envisioned. Unfortunately, the machine was very slow. -
ENIAC
A much faster computer than the Mark I was made possible by replacing the relays with electronic switches which rely on the movement of electrons rather than the slow physical movement of mechanical switches. The electronic switches used were vacuum tubes. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania built the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) for the U.S. government to generate gunnery tables for use in the Second World War. Not finished until 1946, -
Mark II
the Mark II was an electromechanical computer built at Harvard University. The Mark II was constructed with high-speed electromagnetic relays instead of electro-mechanical counters used in the Mark I, making it much faster than its predecessor. It was the second machine to have floating point hardware. -
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Steve jobs
Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs was an American entrepreneur. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios. -
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bill gates
William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate and philanthropist. Gates is the former chief executive and current chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen. He is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest peopleand was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third;in 2011 he was the wealthiest American and the second wealthiest person. -
Fortran
Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. The first manual for FORTRAN appeared in October 1956, with the first FORTRAN compiler delivered in April 1957. -
first "bug" (glitch)
Starting in 1959 she led the design team team for the COBOL language in association with Sperry Univac. Hopper was credited with coining the term "bug" in reference to a glitch in the machinery. The first bug was actually a moth which flew through an open window and into one of the computer relays of the Mark I, temporarily shutting down the system. The moth was removed and pasted into the logbook. From then on, if Hopper's team was not producing numbers, they claimed to be "debugging the system -
Basic
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use; the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The original Dartmouth BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA to provide computer access to non-science students. -
C
In computing, C is a general-purpose programming language initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs. Its design provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, most notably system software like the Unix computer operating system -
PDA
the first PDA was released in 1984. PDA stands for personal digital assistant, also known as palmtop computer, or personal data assistant. PDAs are largely considered obsolete with the widespread adoption of smartphones. -
Java
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems (which has since merged into Oracle Corporation) and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them -
Difference engine
A difference engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. The name derives from the method of divided differences, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial coefficients. Both logarithmic and trigonometric functions, functions commonly used by both navigators and scientists, can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers.
