UNIVERSITY OF SAINT ANTHONY

(DR. SANTIAGO G. ORTEGA MEMORIAL)

CITY OF IRIGA

COLLEGE OF TEACHER EDUCATION

4 BASIC PERIOD OF COMPUTER

1. PRE-MECHANICAL AGE- (3000 B.C.- 1450 A.D.)
WRITING AND ALPHABET
- The first humans communicated only through speaking and picture drawings
- In 3000 BC the Sumerians in Mesopotamia(Iraq) devised a writing system (Cuniform)
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.
- The Chinese developed techniques for making paper from rags, on which modern-
day papermaking is based, around 100 A.D.

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 container
in their personal "libraries.
- The Egyptians kept scrolls - sheets of papyrus wrapped around a shaft of wood.
Around 600 B.C.
- The Greeks began to fold sheets of papyrus vertically into leaves and bind them
together.
- The dictionary and encyclopedia made their appearance about the same time.
- The Greeks are also credited with developing the first truly public libraries around
500 B.C.
THE FIRST NUMBERING SYSTEMS
- 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.
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.

2. THE MECHANICAL AGE 1450-1840

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
 UNIVERSITY OF SAINT ANTHONY
(DR. SANTIAGO G. ORTEGA MEMORIAL)
CITY OF IRIGA

COLLEGE OF TEACHER EDUCATION

- 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
- The development of book indexes (alphabetically sorted lists of topics and names)
and the widespread use of page numbers also made information retrieval a much
easier task.

MATH BY MACHINES
- 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.

SLIDE RULES, THE PASCALINE AND LEIBNIZ’S MACHINE

- Slide Rules - 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.
- 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.
- 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.

3. 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).
 UNIVERSITY OF SAINT ANTHONY
(DR. SANTIAGO G. ORTEGA MEMORIAL)
CITY OF IRIGA

COLLEGE OF TEACHER EDUCATION

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.

4. 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
 UNIVERSITY OF SAINT ANTHONY
(DR. SANTIAGO G. ORTEGA MEMORIAL)
CITY OF IRIGA

COLLEGE OF TEACHER EDUCATION

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.

SOURCE: http://informationtechnoluogy.blogspot.com/