The history of computing devices
It is acknowledged that the earliest computing device was the abacus. Other computing equipment:
- Astrolabe: Allows ships to calculate latitude at sea;
- Slide rule: to help calculate multiplication and division, and hundreds of clocks for sunrise, tide, celestial positions, and pure timekeeping;
- Devices made things that used to be hard work faster, easier and more accurate, but they weren’t called computers yet.
The earliest use of the word “computer”
One of the earliest references to the use of a “computer” comes from a 1613 book by Richard Braitwait. But the term “computer” now referred to a person responsible for calculating, a profession that lasted until 1800.
The development of computing equipment
Step calculator
Built in 1694 by the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz. The machine was a bit like an odometer in a car, adding up miles and being the first machine to do all four operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
Range table:
For example: Speed and accuracy were especially important on the battlefield, so the military began to use computation to solve complex problems. In the beginning, the range table was used in World War II. The limitation was: to modify the cannon or shell design, you had to make a new table, which took time and effort. So Charles Babbage proposed the “difference engine”.
The difference engine:
Charles Babbage began construction in 1823, and for the next two decades attempted to assemble 25,000 parts, weighing a total of nearly 15 tons, and ultimately failed. But in 1991 historians built a difference engine based on Charles Babbage’s draft, and it worked.
Analysis of the machine:
During the construction of the difference engine, Charles Babbage conceived of a more complex machine, the “analytical engine”. Compared with the difference engine, the stepper calculator, and other computing devices before it, the analyzer is a “general-purpose computer” that can do many more things than just specific calculations. But the machine was so far ahead, like the difference engine, that it never got built.
But the idea of an “automatic computer” — a set of operations that a computer could perform automatically — was a generational concept that heralded the birth of computer programs.
Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician, wrote imaginary programs for an analytical machine and is considered the world’s first programmer. The analytical machine also inspired the first generation of computer scientists.
At the end of the 19th century, computers were used for specific problems in science and engineering.
For example: the 1890 census, which took 13 years to complete, Herman Hollerith invented the punched card tabulating machine, which was about 10 times faster than the manual one. Allowing the census to be completed in about two and a half years, saving the census office millions of dollars
Companies discovered the value of computing, and Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company to meet the growing need for computing in a variety of industries. It later merged with other machine makers in 1924 to become “IBM,” with great success.
Summarize the characters, equipment, examples, etc.
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- Charles Babbage, a computer pioneer considered “the father of calculation,” said, “As knowledge grows and new tools are born, manual Labour will shrink.”
- Richard Braitwait, 1613, was one of the first to use the term “computer” in the literature
- Gottfried Leibniz, who built the Step calculator
- Ada Lovelace, considered to be the world’s first programmer
- Herman Hollerith invented the punch card tabulating machine
equipment
- An abacus
- chart
- A slide rule
- Step calculator
- Range table
- The difference engine
- Analysis of the machine
For example:
- The need to calculate artillery and shells on the battlefield
- Census, the need for data-intensive computing