Mechanical Age

•  when we first start to see connections

between our current technology and its
ancestors
•  A lot of new technologies are developed in
this era as there is a large explosion in
interest with this area
1. The First Information Explosion
• Johann Gutenberg (Mainz, Germany)Invented
the movable metal-type printing process in
1450.
• The development of book indexes and the
widespread use of page numbers.
Johannes Gutenberg
( Movable metal-type printing process)
2. The first general purpose "computers“
-Actually people who held the job title "computer: one
who works with numbers.“

3. Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's

Machine.
William Oughtred
(Slide Rules)
Blaise Pascal
(The Pascaline)
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
(Leibniz's Machine)
4. Charles Babbage
(Babbage's Engines)

•The Difference Engine.

•The Analytical Engine.
Joseph Marie Jacquard's loom
Parts remarkably similar to modern-day computers.

• The "store"
• The "mill"
• Punch cards.
Punch card idea picked up by Babbage
from Joseph Marie Jacquard's (1752-1834) loom
• Introduced in 1801.
• Binary logic
• Fixed program that would operate in real time.
Augusta Ada Byron (1815-52).
(The first programmer)