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Assignment 17

The document outlines the history of computing, starting from the term 'computer' which originally referred to human calculators. It highlights significant inventions such as the Pascaline by Blaise Pascal, the stepped reckoner by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the early Harvard Mark I computer built in partnership with IBM. The evolution of mechanical to electronic computing is emphasized, showcasing key figures and their contributions to the field.

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33 views2 pages

Assignment 17

The document outlines the history of computing, starting from the term 'computer' which originally referred to human calculators. It highlights significant inventions such as the Pascaline by Blaise Pascal, the stepped reckoner by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the early Harvard Mark I computer built in partnership with IBM. The evolution of mechanical to electronic computing is emphasized, showcasing key figures and their contributions to the field.

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sandaruwan silva
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Company history

The first computers were people! That is, electronic computerss (and the earlier mechanical
computers) were given this name because they performed the work that had previously been
assigned to people. “Computer” was originally a job title: it was used to describe those human
beings (predominantly women) whose job it was to perform the repetitive calculations required
to compute such things as navigational tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for
astronomical almanacs. Imagine you had a job where hour after hour, day after day, you were to
do nothing but compute multiplications. Boredom would quickly set in, leading to carelessness,
leading to mistakes. And even on your best days you wouldn’t be producing answers very past.
Therefore, inventors have been searching for hundreds of years for a way to mechanize (that is,
find a mechanism that can perform) this task.

Pascaline
In 1642 Blaise pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax
collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) but
couldn’t sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren’t that because
they really weren’t that accurate (at that time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the
required precision) Up until the present age when car dashboards went digital, the odometer
portion of a car’s speedometer used the very same mechanism as the Pascaline to increment the
next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel. Pascal was a child prodigy. 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. Shown
below is an 8-digit version of the Pascaline, and two views of a digit version:

Stepped reckoner
Just a few years after pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton
of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division)
calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because, instead of gears, it 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 had 10 flutes), Leibniz was
the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of
modern computers. Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor
and alone.
Charles Babbage

By the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculation
machine the size of a room, which he called the Different Engine.

Harvard Mark I Computer


One early success was the Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership between
Harvard and IBM in 1944.

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