Early Computing Machines and Inventors

The abacus, which emerged about 5,000 years ago in Asia Minor and is still in use today, may be considered the first computer. This de­vice system of sliding beads arranged on a rack. Early merchants used the abacus to keep trading transactions. But as the use of paper and pencil spread, particularly in Europe, the abacus lost its importance. It took nearly 12 centuries, how­ever, for the next significant advance in computing devices to emerge. In 1642, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the 18-year-old son of a French tax collector, invented what he called a numerical wheel calculator to help his tat her with his duties. This brass rectangular box, also called a Pascaline, used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Pascal's device used a base of ten to accomplish this. For example, as one dial moved ten notches, or one complete revolution, it moved the next dial -which represented the ten's column - one place. When the ten's dial moved one revolution, the dial representing the hundred's place moved one notch and so on.

The drawback to the Pascaline, of course, was its limitation to addition.

In 1694, a German mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), improved the Pascaline by creating a ma­chine that could also multiply. Like its predecessor, Leibniz's mechanical multiplier worked by a system of gears and dials. Partly by studying Pas­cal's original notes and drawings, Leibniz was able to refine his machine. The centerpiece of the machine was its stepped-drum gear design, which offered an elongated version of the simple flat gear. It wasn't until 1820, however, that mechanical calculators gained widespread use. Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchman, invented a machine that could per­form the four basic arithmetic functions. Colmar's mechanical calculator, the arithmometer, presented a more practical approach to computing be­cause it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. With its enhanced versa­tility, the arithmometer was widely used up until the First World War. Although later inventors refined Colmar's calculator, together with fellow inventors Pascal and Leibniz, he helped define the age of mechanical com­putation. The real beginnings of computers as we know them today, how­ever, lay with an English mathematics professor, Charles Babbage (1791-1871). Frustrated at the many errors he found while examining calcula­tions for the Royal Astronomical Society, Babbage declared, "I wish to God these calculations had been performed by steam!" With those words, the automation of computers had begun. By 1812, Babbage noticed a nat­ural harmony between machines and mathematics: machines were best at performing tasks repeatedly without mistake; while mathematics, particu­larly the production of mathematic tables, often required the simple repe­tition of steps. The problem centered on applying the ability of machines to the needs of mathematics. Babbage's first attempt at solving this prob­lem was in 1822 when he proposed a machine to perform differential causations, called a Difference Engine. Powered by steam and large as a locomotive, the machine would have a stored program and could perform calculations and print the results automatically. After working on the Dif­ference Engine for 10 years, Babbage was suddenly inspired to begin work on the first general-purpose computer, which he called the Analytical En­gine. Babbage's assistant, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1842) and daughter of English poet Lord Byron, was instrumental in the machine's design. One of the few people who understood the Engine's design as well as Babbage, she helped revise plans, secure funding from the British government, and communicate the specifics of the Analytical En­gine to the public. Also, Lady Lovelace's fine understanding of the ma­chine allowed her to create the instruction routines to be fed into the com­puter, making her the first female computer programmer. In the 1980's, the U.S. Defense Department named a programming language ADA in her honor.

Babbage's steam-powered Engine, although ultimately never con­structed, may seem primitive by today's standards. However, it outlined the basic elements of a modern general purpose computer and was a breakthrough concept. Consisting of over 50,000 components, the basic design of the Analytical Engine included input devices in the form of perforated cards containing operating instructions and a "store" for memory of 1,000 numbers of up to 50 decimal digits long. It also con­tained a "mill" with a control unit that allowed processing instructions in any sequence, and output devices to produce printed results. Babbage borrowed the idea of punch cards to encode the machine's instructions from the Jacquard loom. The loom, produced in 1820 and named after its inventor, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, used punched boards that control­led the patterns to be woven.

In 1889, an American inventor, Herman Hollerith (1860-1929), also applied the Jacquard loom concept to computing. His first task was to find a faster way to compute the U.S. census. The previous census in 1880 had taken nearly seven years to count and with an expanding pop­ulation, the bureau feared it would take 10 years to count the latest cen­sus. Unlike Babbage's idea of using perforated cards to instruct the ma­chine, Hollerith's method used cards to store data information which he fed into a machine that compiled the results mechanically. Each punch on a card represented one number, and combinations of two punches represented one letter. As many as 80 variables could be stored on a single card. Instead of ten years, census takers compiled their results in just six weeks with Hollerith's machine. In addition to their speed, the punch cards served as a storage method for data and they helped reduce computational errors. Hollerith brought his punch card reader into the business world, founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, later to become International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924 after a series of mergers. Other companies such as Remington Rand and Burroghs also manufactured punch readers for business use. Both business and government used punch cards for data processing until the 1960's.

In the ensuing years, several engineers made other significant ad­vances. Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) developed a calculator for solving differential equations in 1931. The machine could solve complex differ ential equations that had long left scientists and mathematicians baffled. The machine was cumbersome because hundreds of gears and shafts were required to represent numbers and their various relationships to each other. To eliminate this bulkiness, John V. Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State College (now called Iowa State University) and his gradu­ate student, Clifford Berry, envisioned an all-electronic computer that applied Boolean algebra to computer circuitry. This approach was based on the mid-19th century work of George Boole (1815-1864) who clari­fied the binary system of algebra, which stated that any mathematical equations could be stated simply as either true or false. By extending this concept to electronic circuits in the form of on or off Atanasoff and Berry had developed the first all-electronic computer by 1940. Their project, however, lost its funding and their work was overshadowed by similar developments by other scientists.