A History of Information Technology and

Systems
 Four basic periods, each characterized by a principal technology used to solve the input, processing, output and
communication problems of the time:
1. Premechanical,
2. Mechanical,
3. Electromechanical, and
4. Electronic

A. The Premechanical Age: 3000 B.C. - 1450 A.D.

1. Writing and Alphabets. The first humans communicated only through speaking and picture drawings. In 3000 B.C., the
Sumerians in Mesopotamia (what is today southern Iraq) devised a writing system. The system, called "cuniform" used
signs corresponding to spoken sounds, instead of pictures, to express words.

2. Paper and Pens. For the Sumerians, input technology consisted of a penlike device called a stylus that could scratch
marks in wet clay. About 2600 B.C., the Egyptians discovered that they could write on the papyrus plant, using hollow
reeds or rushes to hold the first "ink" - pulverized carbon or ash mixed with lamp oil and gelatin from boiled donkey skin.

3. Books and Libraries: Permanent Storage Devices. Religious leaders in Mesopotamia kept the earliest "books"" a
collection of rectangular clay tablets, inscribed with cuneiform and packaged in labeled containers — in their personal
"libraries." The Egyptians kept scrolls - sheets of papyrus wrapped around a shaft of wood.

4. The First Numbering Systems. The Egyptians struggled with a system that depicted the numbers 1-9 as vertical lines,
the number 10 as a U or circle, the number 100 as a coiled rope, and the number 1,000 as a lotus blossom. The first
numbering systems similar to those in use today were invented between 100 and 200 A.D. by Hindus in India who created
a nine-digit numbering system. Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was developed. It was through the Arab traders that
today's numbering system — 9 digits plus a 0 — made its way to Europe sometime in the 12th century.

5. The First Calculators. The existence of a counting tool called the abacus, one of the very first information processors,
permitted people to "store" numbers temporarily and to perform calculations using beads strung on wires. It continued
to be an important tool throughout the Middle Ages.

B. The Mechanical Age: 1450 - 1840

1. The First Information Explosion. Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, invented the movable metal-type printing
process in 1450 and sped up the process of composing pages from weeks to a few minutes. The printing press made
written information much more accessible to the general public by reducing the time and cost that it took to reproduce
written material.

2. Math by Machine. The first general purpose "computers" were actually people who held the job title "computer: one
who works with numbers." Difficulties in human errors were slowing scientists and mathematicians in their pursuit of
greater knowledge.

3. Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.

a. Slide Rule. In the early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English clergyman, invented the slide rule, a device that allowed
the user to multiply and divide by sliding two pieces of precisely machines and scribed wood against each other. The slide
rule is an early example of an analog computer — an instrument that measures instead of counts.
b. Pascaline. Blaise Pascal, later to become a famous French mathematician, built one of the first mechanical computing
machines as a teenage, around 1642. It was called a Pascaline, and it used a series of wheels and cogs to add and subtract
numbers.

c. Leibniz's Machine. Gottfried von Leibniz, an important German mathematician and philosopher (he independently
invented calculus at the same time as Newton) was able to improve on Pascal's machine in the 1670s by adding additional
components that made multiplication and division easier.

4. Babbage's Engines

a. The Difference Engine. An eccentric English mathematician named Charles Babbage, frustrated by mistakes, set his
mind to creating a machine that could both calculate numbers and print the results. In the 1820s, he was able to produce
a working model of his first attempt, which he called the Difference Engine (the name was based on a method of solving
mathematical equations called the "method of differences"). Made of toothed wheels and shafts turned by a hand crank,
the machine could do computations and create charts showing the squares and cubes of numbers. He had plans for a
more complex Difference Engine but was never able to actually build it because of difficulties in obtaining funds, but he
did create and leave behind detailed plans.

b. The Analytical Engine. Designed during the 1830s by Babbage, the Analytical Engine had parts remarkably similar to
modern-day computers. For instance, the Analytical Engine was to have a part called the "store," which would hold the
numbers that had been inputted and the quantities that resulted after they had been manipulated. It was also to have a
part called the "mill" - an area in which the numbers were actually manipulated. Babbage also planned to use punch cards
to direct the operations performed by the machine — an idea he picked up from seeing the results that a French weaver
named Joseph Jacquard had achieved using punched cards to automatically control the patterns that would be woven
into cloth by a loom.

c. Augusta Ada Byron. She helped Babbage design the instructions that would be given to the machine on punch cards
(for which she has been called the "first programmer") and to describe, analyze, and publicize his ideas. Babbage
eventually was forced to abandon his hopes of building the Analytical Engine, once again because of a failure to find
funding.

C. The Electromechanical Age: 1840 - 1940.

The discovery of ways to harness electricity was the key advance made during this period. Knowledge and information
could now be converted into electrical impulses.

1. The Beginnings of Telecommunication. Technologies that form the basis for modern-day telecommunication systems
include:

a. Voltaic Battery. The discovery of a reliable method of creating and storing electricity (with a voltaic battery) at the end
of the 18th century made possible a whole new method of communicating information.

b. Telegraph. The telegraph, the first major invention to use electricity for communication purposes, made it possible to
transmit information over great distances with great speed.

c. Morse Code. The usefulness of the telegraph was further enhanced by the development of Morse Code in 1835 by
Samuel Morse, an American from Poughkeepsie, New York. Morse devised a system that broke down information (in this
case, the alphabet) into bits (dots and dashes) that could then be transformed into electrical impulses and transmitted
over a wire (just as today's digital technologies break down information into zeros and ones).

d. Telephone and Radio. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. This was followed by the discovery that
electrical waves travel through space and can produce an effect far from the point at which they originated. These two
events led to the invention of the radio by Marconi in 1894.
2. Electromechanical Computing

a. Herman Hollerith and IBM. By 1890, Herman Hollerith, a young man with a degree in mining engineering who worked
in the Census Office in Washington, D.C., had perfected a machine that could automatically sort census cards into a
number of categories using electrical sensing devices to "read" the punched holes in each card and thus count the millions
of census cards and categorize the population into relevant groups. The company that he founded to manufacture and
sell it eventually developed into the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

b. Mark 1. Howard Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, decided to try to combine Hollerith's punched card
technology with Babbage's dreams of a general-purpose, "programmable" computing machine. With funding from IBM,
he built a machine known as the Mark I, which used paper tape to supply instructions(programs) to the machine tor
manipulating data (input on paper punch cards), counters to store numbers, and electromechanical relays to help register
results.

D. The Electronic Age: 1940 - Present.

1. First Tries. In the early 1940s, scientists around the world began to realize that electronic vacuum tubes, like the type
used to create early radios, could be used to replace electromechanical parts.

2. Eckert and Mauchly.

a. The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes, the ENIAC. John Mauchly, a physicist, and J.
Prosper Eckert, an electrical engineer, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania,
funded by the U.S. Army, developed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) in 1946. It could add,
subtract, multiply and divide in milliseconds and calculate the trajectory of an artillery round in about 20 seconds.

b. The First Stored-Program Computer. A problem with the ENIAC was that the machine had no means of storing program
instructions in its memory - to change the instructions, the machine would literally have to be rewired. Mauchly and Eckert
began to design the EDVAC - the Electronic Discreet Variable Computer -to address this problem. John von Neumann
joined the team as a consultant and produced an influential report in June 1945 synthesizing and expanding on Eckert and
Mauchly's ideas, which resulted in von Neumann being credited as the originator of the stored program concept. Maurice
Wilkes, a British scientist at Cambridge University, completed the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator)
two years before EDVAC was finished, thereby taking the claim of the first stored-program computer.

c. The First General-Purpose Computer for Commercial Use. Eckert and Mauchly began the development of a computer
called UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), which they hoped would be the world's first general-purpose computer
for commercial use, but they ran out of money and sold their company to Remington Rand. A machine called LEO (Lyons
Electronic Office) went into action a few months before UNIVAC and became the world's first commercial computer.

3. The Four Generations of Digital Computing.

a. The First Generation (1951-1958).
b. The Second Generation (1959-1963).
c. The Third Generation (1964-1979).
d. The Fourth Generation (1979- Present).