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A Brief History of Computers

A Brief History of Computers. By Bernard John Poole, MSIS Associate Professor of Education and Instructional Technology University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown Johnstown, PA 15904.

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A Brief History of Computers

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  1. A Brief History of Computers By Bernard John Poole, MSIS Associate Professor of Education and Instructional Technology University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown Johnstown, PA 15904

  2. Pre-Mechanical Computing:From Counting on fingersto pebblesto hash marks on wallsto hash marks on boneto hash marks in sand Interesting thought: Do any species, other than homo sapiens, count?

  3. Mechanical computers From The Abacus c. 4000 BCE to Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine (1812)

  4. Mechanical computers:The Abacus (c. 3000 BCE)

  5. Napier’s Bones andLogarithms (1617) Picture courtesy IBM

  6. Oughtred’s (1621) and Schickard‘s (1623]slide rule

  7. Blaise Pascal’sPascaline (1645)

  8. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz’sStepped Reckoner (1674)

  9. Joseph-Marie Jacquard and his punched card controlled looms (1804)

  10. Preparing the cards with the pattern for the cloth to be woven

  11. Charles Babbage (1791-1871)The Father of Computers

  12. Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine [1822-1842]

  13. The latest working model of Babbage’s Difference Engine [1989-1991]

  14. Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine [1837-1871—never completed] Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding.

  15. Lady Augusta AdaCountess of Lovelace (1815-1852] Read Lady Augusta Ada’s translation of Menabrea’s Sketch of the Analytical Engine

  16. Electro-mechanical computers From Herman Hollerith’s 1890 Census Counting Machine to Howard Aiken and the Harvard Mark I (1944)

  17. Herman Hollerith and hisCensus Tabulating Machine (1884)

  18. A closer look at the Census Tabulating Machine

  19. The Harvard Mark I (1944)aka IBM’s Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC)

  20. The first computer bug Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper

  21. Electronic digital computers From John Vincent Atanasoff’s 1939 Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) to the present day

  22. Alan Turing1912-1954 The Turing Machine Aka The Universal Machine 1936

  23. John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995) Physics Prof At Iowa State University, Ames, IA

  24. Clifford Berry (1918-1963) PhD student of Dr. Atanasoff’s

  25. 1939The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) The ABC was the first electronic digital computer, invented by John Vincent Atanasoff

  26. 1943 Bletchley Park’s Colossus The Enigma Machine

  27. 1946The ENIAC John Presper Eckert (1919-1995) and John Mauchly (1907-1980) of the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Engineering

  28. The ENIAC:Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer

  29. Programming the ENIAC

  30. ENIAC’s Wiring! John Von Neumann John Von Neumann came up with the bright idea of using part of the computer’s internal memory (called Primary Memory) to “store” the program inside the computer and have the computer go get the instructions from its own memory, just as we do with our human brain.

  31. 1951Univac Typical 1968 prices—EX-cluding maintenance & support!

  32. “What hath God wrought!”First telegraph message sent by Samuel Morse, 1844Electronic and computing technology quickly progressed—at an ever-accelerating pace—from vacuum tubes (Lee de Forrest, the audion, 1907)to transistors (William Shockley et al. 1947)to semiconductors (Jack Kilby& Robert Noyce, 1958)to microprocessors (M.E. “Ted” Hoff, 1971)to personal computers [Atari, Apple, IBM, et al., 1975- ]to networking and the Internet (Vinton Cerf & Robert Kahn, 1982]to the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee, 1991)to mobile/cell phones, tablet PCsand beyond…Today, you’ll find computers everywhere you care to look and they are controlling an increasingly broad spectrum of the devices we use as we go about our daily lives. The phone is now (2014) a full-blown computing, communication, and entertainment device.Whatever next?…

  33. Acknowledgements (continued on next slide) For one of the best written books on the history of computers, check out Engines of the Mind : The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors -- by Joel N. Shurkin (Paperback) A movingly beautiful book on Alan Turing is Alan Turing: the Enigma, by Andrew Hodges An excellent, readable book on Cryptography is Simon Singh’s THE CODE BOOK. The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking Tutorials on the encryption software PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) can be found at http://www.pitt.edu/~poole/PGPintro.htm All pictures and some of the information were obtained from various sites on the World Wide Web. Complete list follows: Abacus: http://qi-journal.com/action.lasso?-Token.SearchID=Abacus&-Response=culture.asp Napier: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Napier.html http://www.maxmon.com/1600ad.htm Slide Rules: http://www.hpmuseum.org/sliderul.htm Pascal’s Pascaline: http://www.thocp.net/hardware/pascaline.htm Leibnitz Stepped Reckoner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepped_Reckoner Jacquard looms: http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/jacquard1.html http://www.deutsches-museum.de/ausstell/meister/e_web.htm

  34. Acknowledgements (continued) Charles Babbage: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Babbage.html http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/babbage/index.asp Lady Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace: http://www.well.com/user/adatoole/bio.htm http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html Electricity: http://www.mediaeng.com/historyelect.html (beautifully written pocket history of electricity & magnetism) Herman Hollerith: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hollerith.html Howard Aiken & The Harvard Mark I: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Aiken.html Alan Turing: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Turing.html John Vincent Atanasoff: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/books/mollenhoff/overview.shtml Biographies of Atanasoff and Clifford Berry: http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/Biographies.html J. Presper Eckert: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Eckert_John.html John Mauchly: http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Mauchly.html The patent controversy: http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwm7.html ARPANet: http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa.html Thanks to the following EDTECH listserv colleagues and friends who have reviewed the presentation and provided amendments and additional material for inclusion on the slides and in the notes. Nancy Head, online instructor, Michigan Virtual High School (MVHS), U.S.A., on the web at www.mivhs.org Mandi Axmann, Instructional Designer, Open Universities Australia

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