THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING

-INTRODUCTION:-
Evolution of computing means evolution of technology that have
brought upon the modern computing area.

We will divide the evloution of computing at:

- the origins of computing from as far back as 3000 BC with the abacus.

- 1st Generation of Computing

- 2nd Generation of Computing

- 3rd Generation of Computing

-PURPOSE:-
Appreciate how fast this technology is evolving and the scientists who
have brought this technology.

-THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING:-

Many inventions have taken a several centuries to develop into their
modern forms and modern inventions are rarely the product of single
inventions efforts.

The Bits and pieces of computers, Both hardware and software, have
come together over many centuries, With many people adding a small
contributes.
1-The chines abacus:-
the first computer begins with the birth of chines
abacus which is believed to be around 4,000
years(3000 BC) ago, it is Used for counting and
calculating.

2-Blais Pascal:-
At 1642, it is it is the first mechanical calculator
signs technophobia emerging with mathmaticians
fearing the loss of thier jobs due to progress

3- Gottfried Leibniz:-
From 1660 to early 1700s, Gottfried leibniz is a pioneer in many fields,
Especially his contributions to mathematics and his considerations at
first computing machines.

He is inspired by pascal, He created his own

calculating machine, Able to perform all
four arthimetric operations ( *, + ,/, -) ,
Invented and refined the binary number system, which is at the
foundation of virtually all digital computers.

4- Charles Babbage:-
Babbage is known as the father of the computer,with the design of his
mechanical calculating engines.

In 1820, Noticed that many computations consisted of operations

regularly repeated and theorized these operations done automatically.
led to his first design.
The difference engine, have a fixed
instruction set, be fully automatic
through the use of steam power and
print its results into a table.

In 1830, Babbage stopped work on his

difference engine to pursue his second
idea, the analytical engine. Elaborating on the difference engine this
machine would be able to execute operations in non-numeric orders
through the addition of conditional control, store memory and read
instructions from punch cards, making it a programmable mechanical
computer.

Unfortunately due to lack of funding his designs never came to reality,

but if they had would have sped up the invention of the computer by
nearly 100 years.

5- ADA LOVELACE:-
She is considered the world's first
programmer and came up with an
algorithm that would calculate
Bernoulli numbers that was designed
to work with Babbage's machine.

She also outlined many fundamentals

of programming such as, data analysis, looping and memory
addressing,with inspiration from Babbage.
6- herman Hollerith:-
designed one of the first successful
electromechanical machines, This
machine would read U.S. census data
from punched cards, up to 65 at a time,
and tally up the results.

he went on to found his own firm to

market the device, this company eventually became IBM. To briefly
explain how punched cards work.

The 1800s were a period where the theory of computing began to

evolve and machines started to be used for calculations, but the 1900s
is where we begin to see the pieces of this nearly 5,000 year puzzle
coming together, especially between 1930 to 1950. In 1936.

7- alan turing:-
Proposed the concept of a universal machine "the
Turing machine", capable of computing anything that is
computable. Up to this point, machines were only able
to do certain tasks that the hardware was designed for.
The concept of the modern computer is largely based
off Turings.

8-Konrad Zuse:-
In 1936, German engineer, Konrad Zuse the
inventor of the modern-day computer, invented
the world's first programmable computer. This
device read instructions from punched tape and
was the first computer to use boolean logic and
binary to make decisions, through the use of relays. For reference.

In 1942, with the computer the Z4, Zuse also released the world's first
commercial computer.

9-howard aiken:-
In 1937, Howard Aiken with
his colleagues at Harvard
and in collaboration with
IBM began work on the,
Harvard Mark 1 Calculating
Machine, a programmable
calculator and inspired by
Babbage's analytical engine.

This machine was composed of nearly 1 million parts, had over 500
miles of wiring and weighed nearly 5 tons! The Mark 1 had 60 sets of
24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each 23
decimal digits.

It could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second, a multiplication

took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds and a logarithm or trig
function took about 1 minute.

10-grace hopper:-
Grace Hopper, discovered the first
computer bug, a dead moth
blocking one of the reading holes of
the machine. Hopper is also credited with coining the word debugging.
- 1st Generation of Computing
The vacuum tube era marks the beginning of
modern computing

-In 1937 and completing in 1942, the first digital

computer(ABC) was built by John Atanasoff and his
graduate student Clifford Berry.

In 1943, the Colossus was built in collaboration with Alan Turing, to

assist in breaking German crypto codes.

Completing construction in 1946, the Electrical

Numerical Integrator and Computer aka the
ENIAC was completed.

in 1945, mathematician John von Neumann, contributed a new

understanding of how computers should be organized and
built,elaborated on conditional addressing or subroutines.

Von Neumann assisted in the design of the ENIACs

successor, the Electronic Discrete Variable
Automatic Computer aka the EDVAC, which was
completed in 1950 and the first stored-program
computer.

- 2nd Generation of Computing

In 1947, the first silicon transistor was invented at Bell Labs

by 1954 the first transistorized digital computerwas

invented, aka the TRADIC. It was composed of 800
transistors, took the space of .085 cubic, only took 100
watts of power and could perform 1 million operations
per second.
Also during this era, the first memory device(RAM),
the random-access magnetic core store, was
introduced in 1951 by Jay Forrester.

The first hard drive was introduced by IBM in 1957

On the software side , Assembly was the first programming language

to be introduced in 1949 but really started taking off in this era of
computing.

The first true widely used programming language was Fortran invented
by John Backus at IBM in 1954. Assembly is a low-level language and
Fortran is a high-level language.

In low-level languages while you aren't writing instructions in machine

code, a very deep understanding of computer architecture and

Instructions is still required to execute a desired program, which

means a limited number of people have the skills and it is very error-
prone. Also in the.

- 3nd Generation of Computing

In 1958, this all changed with Jack Kilby of Texas
Instruments and his invention of the integrated
circuit. The integrated circuit was a way to pack

many transistors onto a single chip, instead of

individually wiring transistorsIntegrated circuits
sparked a hardwarerevolution and beyond
computers assisted in the development of various other electronic
such as the devices due to miniaturization
mouse invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964, he
also demonstrated the first graphical user
interface as a side note. Computer speed,
performance, memory and storage also began to
iteratively increases as ICs could

pack more transistors into smaller surface areas

in 1971 by IBM and in the same year, DRAM by Intel, to list a few

in 1964 and C in 1971, computing since the 1900s has evolved at an

,increasingly fast rate. Thus

in 1965, led Gordon Moore, one of the founders of

Intel, to make one of the greatest predictions in human history:

Computing power would double every two years at low cost

Moore's Law. Here are some charts to further illustrate how fast
computing was evolving.