HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF COMPUTER

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF COMPUTER

Attempts have continuously been made to harness natural resources less cumbersome, and less arduous. This insatiable desire has occupied his mind all along the years of his existence. Man passed through different ages. Now, we are in the information age and the center of this information age is the electronic digital computer. Its advent has in no small way made the performance of data processing faster, more accurate, more reliable, less cumbersome and less arduous. History of computer is as old as mankind. In the past, counting and other simple arithmetic operations were performed by the use of different parts of the human body such as fingers and toes. Stones were also used in the early counting. All this gave rise to other attempts/devices to produce what we call computer today.

EARLY AIDS FOR COUNTING AND COMPUTING DEVICES TO 19^TH CENTURY

THE FINGERS AND TOES

  Man uses fingers and toes in trying to solve basic Arithmetical problems in mathematics such as addition, subtraction, division etc.

STONES

 In the early accounting, man also uses piles of stones to substitute fingers and stones trying to solve the problem of counting.

COMPUTING DEVICES I

THE ABACUS

This was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its importance is to aid the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled Abacus operator can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with a hand calculator. The oldest surviving Abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. The Abacus is still in use today, principally in the Far East. The older Abacus dates from the time when pebbles were used for counting while the modern Abacus consists of rings that slide over rods.

NOTE: The Abacus is a representation of the human fingers: The 5 lower rings on each rod represent the 5 fingers and the 2 upper rings represent the 2 hands.

SLIDE RULE

Napier’s invention led directly to the slide rule. This was 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.

In 1617 an electric Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, a technology that allows multiplication to be performed through addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier’s bones.

PASCAL’S CALCULATOR (PASCALINE)

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age of 19, invented the paschaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator which could only add. The odometer portion of a car’s speedometer used the very same mechanism as the Pascaline to increment to the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel. At the age of 12, he was discovered doing his version of Euclid’s thirty-second proposition on the kitchen floor. Pascal went on to invent probability theory, the hydraulic press, and the syringe.

LEIBNITZ MULTIPLIER

A few years after Pascal, a German, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (Co-inventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner. This calculator instead of gears employed fluted drums having ten flutes-arranged around their circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system (each drum had10 flutes), Leibnitz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern Computers. Leibnitz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone.

JACQUARD’S LOOM

In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Jacquard invented a power loom that could design on a fabric upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, help together in a long row by rope. Jacquard’s technology was a real boon to mill owners.

CHARLES BABBAGE

By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating machine of the size of a room, which he called the deference engine. This machine would be able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables but the device was never finished.

ANALYTICAL ENGINE

In 1833, Babbage designed a machine called an “Analytical Engine”. This device is large as a house, powered by 6 steam engine, more general purpose in nature and programmable due to the punched card technology of Jacquard. Through the connecting to the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two main parts of his analytical engine the “store” and the “mill” as both terms and used in the weaving industry. The store was where numbers were held and mill was where they were woven into new results. In a modern computer these same parts are called the memory unit and the central processing unit (C.P.U)

HOLLERITH CENSUS MACHINE

This is also known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count a large wall of dial indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the result of the count.

  The patterns on Jacquard’s care were determined when a tapestry was designed and then were not changed. Today, we would call this a read-only form of information storage.  Hollerith has the insight to convert punched cards to what is today called a read/write technology.

Hollerith’s technique was successful and the 1890’s census completed in only 3 years rather than 7 years, saving 5 million dollars. Incidentally, the Hollerith census machine was the first machine to ever be featured on a magazine cover.

BURROUGH’S MACHINE

In 1885, William Seward Burroughs from the American Arithmometer company invented this mechanical adding machine. The early Burroughs models were large machines characterized by having glass panels in the slides, so the mechanism could be seen. Due to constant development in mechanical calculators through to the 1960’s. Burroughs converted to electronic desk calculators and in mid to late 1970s, their products dropped from the market.

COMMON COMPONENTS OF THE BOROUGHS MACHINE ARE

1.                   Keypads: This is used for inputting numbers into the machine.

2.                   Lever: When the lever is pulled and released on the side of the machine, it causes the machine to add entry to a running and print the total.

3.                   Registers: This is usually found behind the glass front of the machine, it is where an operator of the machine reads the running total of their calculations.

4.                   Printer: Found at the rear of the machine with a carriage also on the rear, the operator will have to lift the carriage to see what is printed. Burroughs machines were “blind” printers. They were used for scientific, engineering, and other calculations requiring multiplication and division of long numbers. There were limitations in their calculations especially in the areas where many large tables such as logarithm, trigonometric applications, etc. were involved.