The Evolution of Computer Technology

The Evolution of Computer Technology — page 7 — The Evolution of Computer Technology oped in 1620 by the English mathematician Edmund Gunter The slide rule was originally used to multiply or divide numbers Between 1642 and 1644 French mathemati cian and scientist Blaise Pascal created a calculator called the Pascaline He connected a gear system of multiple wheels and cogs to represent scales of ten the ones place the tens place the hundreds place and so on The positioning of each cog is how it stored data just as bead positions stored data on an abacus The Pascaline allowed a greater scope of pos sible calculations than the abacus In a sense it was the first mechanical calculator and it was very pop ular Yet it was soon modified by the German math ematician Gottfried Leibniz who created differential and integral calculus BABBAGE’S ENGINE AND THE BEGINNING OF MACHINERY In 1833 Charles Babbage outlined a steam-driven machine called the Analytical Engine It contained input devices storage like a hard drive a mill or a com puting unit a control unit and output devices It would 10

The Evolution of Computer Technology — page 8 — Early Computers have been the size of a train and contained more than 50,000 moving parts To store data Bab bage proposed that the device would punch holes into paper cards in certain configurations This way of storing data was inspired by the Jac quard loom which used a similar technique to weave silk Babbage never completed the engine despite work ing on it for nearly forty years Yet Babbage’s Analytical Engine served as a blueprint for mod ern computer devices These were initially to be gigantic inflexible completely immobile and prohibitively costly Ada King Countess of Lovelace worked with Babbage on the Analyt ical Engine She is considered the first computer programmer In the 1880s an American named Herman Holler ith worked on a multi-part machine that would count 11 11

The Evolution of Computer Technology — page 9 — The Evolution of Computer Technology The Evolution of Computer Technology sort and consolidate information stored on punch cards The machine was created with a pre-deter mined set of perforations A perforated card placed into the machine slid into a board of pins When a pin found a hole it completed an electrical circuit and transferred the information that hole represented Hollerith first demonstrated this machine on local city records before he was awarded the con The Hollerith tabulating machine resembles a bulky and complicated typewriter It was just one segment in a larger machine 12 12

The Evolution of Computer Technology — page 10 — Early Computers tract to handle the 1890 US Census The tabulator was composed of different segments each of which required a staff of human operators Yet it was able to tabulate the census in only about six years In contrast the previous census had taken more than seven years to tabulate by hand In 1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company to begin mass production of such machines In the 1900s it eventually became part of the Interna tional Business Machines Corporation or IBM NEW OFFICIAL STANDARDS Perforated cards would go on to be the standard for computer input for decades Perforated cards are also the basis of what might be called the first search engine Called the Mundaneum a city of knowl edge it was built by a Belgian man named Paul Otlet in 1930 with help from the Belgian government The Mundaneum was an ambitious project for its time Otlet had previously devised the Universal Decimal Classification UDC system with nine cat egories for example literature mathematics and natural science and more than 70,000 subdivi sions Now he attempted to build an actual engine 13

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