Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage (26 December 1791 - 18 October 1871) was an

English mathematician, analytical philosopher, mechanical engineer and
(proto-) computer scientist who originated the idea of a programmable
computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the
London Science Museum. In 1991, working fromBabbage's original plans,
adifference engine was completed, and functioned perfectly. It was built
to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, indicating thatBabbage's
machine would have worked. Nine years later, the Science Museum
completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine;
it featured astonishing complexity for a 19th-century device.
Charles Babbage
Life
Charles Babbage was born in England, most likely at 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London. A blue
plaque on the junction of Larcom Street and Walworth Road commemorates the event. There was a
discrepancy regarding the date of Babbage's birth, which was published in The Times obituary as 26
December 1792. However, days later a nephew of Babbage wrote to say that Babbage was born precisely
one year earlier, in 1791. The parish register of St. Mary's Newington, London, shows that Babbage was
baptised on 6 January 1792.
Babbage's father, Benjamin Babbage, was a banking partner of the Praeds who owned the Bitton Estate in
Teignmouth. His mother was Betsy Plumleigh Babbage. In 1808, the Babbage family moved into the old
Rowdens house in East Teignmouth, and Benjamin Babbage became a warden of the nearby St. Michael’s
Church.

Education

His father's money allowed Charles to receive instruction from several schools and tutors during the
course of his elementary education. Around age eight he was sent to a country school to recover from a
life-threatening fever. His parents ordered that his "brain was not to be taxed too much" and Babbage felt
that "this great idleness may have led to some of my childish reasonings". He was sent to King Edward VI
Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon, a thriving comprehensive school still there today, but his health
forced him back to private tutors for a time. He then joined a 30-student academy under Reverend
Stephen Freeman. The academy had a well-stocked library that prompted Babbage's love of mathematics.
He studied with two more private tutors after leaving the academy. Of the first, a clergyman near
Cambridge, Babbage said, "I fear I did not derive from it all the advantages that I might have done." The
second was an Oxford tutor from whom Babbage learned enough of the Classics to be accepted to
Cambridge.
Babbage arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1810. He had read extensively in Leibniz,
Lagrange, Simpson, and Lacroix and was seriously disappointed in the mathematical instruction available
at Cambridge. In response, he, John Herschel, George Peacock, and several other friends formed the
Analytical Society.
In 1812 Babbage transferred to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was the top mathematician at Peterhouse, but
failed to graduate with honours. He instead received an honorary degree without examination in 1814.

Marriage

On 25 July 1814, Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore at St. Michael's Church in Teignmouth, Devon. His
father did not approve of the marriage. The couple lived happily at 5 Devonshire Street, Portland Place,
London. They had seven children, but only three lived to adulthood. Charles' father, wife, and one son all
died in 1827.

Children

 Benjamin Herschel Babbage (born 6 August 1815)

 Charles Whitmore Babbage (born 22 January 1817)
 Georgiana Whitmore Babbage (born 17 July 1818)
 Edward Stewart Babbage (born 15 December 1819)
 Francis Moore Babbage (born 1 June 1821)
 Dugald Bromheald Babbage (born 13 March 1823)
 Henry Prevost Babbage (born 16 September 1824)

Design of computers

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
In recognition of the high error rate in the calculation of mathematical tables, Babbage wanted to find a
method by which they could be calculated mechanically, removing human sources of error. Three different
factors seem to have influenced him: a dislike of untidiness; his experience working on logarithmic tables;
and existing work on calculating machines carried out by Wilhelm Schickard, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried
Leibniz. He first discussed the principles of a calculating engine in a letter to Sir Humphrey Davy in 1822.
Babbage's engines were among the first mechanical computers. His engines were not actually completed,
largely because of funding problems and personality issues. Babbage realized that a machine could do the
work better and more reliably than a human being. Babbage controlled building of some steam-powered
machines that more or less did their job; calculations could be mechanized to an extent. Although
Babbage's machines were mechanical monsters their basic architecture was astonishingly similar to a
modern computer. The data and program memory were separated, operation was instruction based,
control unit could make conditional jumps and the machine had a separate I/O unit. Inventions not talked
about here but worth mentioning are: The cowcatcher, dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform
postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich Time signals, and heliograph ophthalmoscope.

Difference engine

In Babbage’s time, numerical tables were calculated by humans called ‘computers’. At Cambridge he saw
the high error rate of the people computing the tables and thus started his life’s work in trying to calculate
the tables mechanically, removing all human error. He began in 1822 with what he called the difference
engine, made to compute values of polynomial functions.
Unlike similar efforts of the time, Babbage's difference engine was created to calculate a series of values
automatically. By using the method of finite differences, it was possible to avoid the need for
multiplication and division.
The first difference engine needed around 25,000 parts of a combined weight of fifteen tons standing eight
feet high. Although he received much funding for the project, he did not complete it. He later designed an
improved version, "Difference Engine No. 2". This was not constructed at the time, but was built using his
plans in 1989-1991, to 19th century tolerances, and performed its first calculation at the London Science
Museum bringing back results to 31 digits, far more than the average modern pocket calculator.

Printer

Babbage designed a printer for the second difference engine which had some remarkable features; it
supported line-wrapping, variable column and row width, and programmable output formatting.

Analytical engine

Soon after the attempt at making the difference engine crumbled, Babbage started designing a different,
more complex machine called the Analytical Engine. The engine is not a single physical machine but a
succession of designs that he tinkered with until his death in 1871. The main difference between the two
engines is that the Analytical Engine could be programmed using punch cards, an idea unheard of in his
time. He realized that programs could be put on similar cards so the person had to only create the
program initially, and then put the cards in the machine and let it run. The analytical engine was also
proposed to use loops of Jacquard's punched cards to control a mechanical calculator, which could
formulate results based on the results of preceding computations. This machine was also intended to
employ several features subsequently used in modern computers, including sequential control, branching,
and looping, and would have been the first mechanical device to be Turing-complete.
Ada Lovelace, an impressive mathematician and one of the few people who totally understood Babbage's
vision, created a program for the Analytical Engine. Had the Analytical Engine ever actually been built, her
program would have been able to calculate a numerical sequence known as the Bernoulli numbers. Based
on this work, Ada is now credited as being the first computer programmer and, in 1979, a contemporary
programming language was named Ada in her honour. Shortly afterward, in 1981, a satirical article in
Datamation magazine described the Babbage programming language, the "language of the future".

Other accomplishments
In 1824, Babbage won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society "for his invention of an engine for
calculating mathematical and astronomical tables".
From 1828 to 1839 Babbage was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He contributed largely
to several scientific periodicals, and was instrumental in founding the Astronomical Society in 1820 and
the Statistical Society in 1834. However, he dreamt of designing mechanical calculating machines.
... I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society, at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the
table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member,
coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep, called out, "Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming
about?" to which I replied "I am thinking that all these tables" (pointing to the logarithms) "might be
calculated by machinery."

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
In 1837, responding to the official eight Bridgewater Treatises "On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of
God, as manifested in the Creation", he published his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise putting forward the
thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making laws (or
programs) which then produced species at the appropriate times, rather than continually interfering with
ad hoc miracles each time a new species was required. The book is a work of natural theology. The book
incorporated extracts from correspondence he had been having with John Herschel on the subject.
Charles Babbage also achieved notable results in cryptography. He broke Vigenère's autokey cipher as
well as the much weaker cipher that is called Vigenère cipher today. The autokey cipher was generally
called "the undecipherable cipher", though owing to popular confusion, many thought that the weaker
polyalphabetic cipher was the "undecipherable" one. Babbage's discovery was used to aid English military
campaigns, and was not published until several years later; as a result credit for the development was
instead given to Friedrich Kasiski, who made the same discovery some years after Babbage.
Babbage also invented the pilot (also called a cow-catcher), the metal frame attached to the front of
locomotives that clears the tracks of obstacles in 1838. He also performed several studies on Isambard
Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway.
He only once endeavoured to enter public life, when, in 1832, he stood unsuccessfully for the borough of
Finsbury. He came in last in the polls.

Eccentricities
Babbage once counted all the broken panes of glass of a factory, publishing in 1857 a "Table of the Relative Frequency of
the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows": 14 of 464 were caused by "drunken men, women or boys". His distaste
for commoners ("the Mob") included writing "Observations of Street Nuisances" in 1864, as well as tallying up 165
"nuisances" over a period of 80 days; he especially hated street music. He was also obsessed with fire, once baking
himself in an oven at 265°F (130°C) for four minutes "without any great discomfort" and to "see what would happen".
Later, he arranged to be lowered into Mount Vesuvius in order to view molten lava for himself.
The earliest computing hardware was probably some form of tally stick; later
recording devices include the Phoenician clay shapes which represented counts of
items, probably livestock or grains, in containers. These seem to have been used by
the merchants, accountants, and government officials of the time.

Devices to aid computation have evolved from simple recording and counting devices
through the abacus, the slide rule, and more recent electronic computers. Even today,
an experienced abacus user using a device designed hundreds of years ago can
sometimes complete basic calculations more quickly than an unskilled person using an
electronic calculator - though for more complex calculations, computers out-perform
even the most skilled human.
This article presents the major developments in the history of computing hardware and
attempts to put them in context.
Acorn Atom
Earliest devices
Humanity has used devices to aid in computation for millennia.
One example is a
device for
establishing equality
by weight: the
Chinese and others
classic scales later
frustrated with
used to symbolize
counting on their
equality in justice.
fingers invented the
Another is simple
Abacus
enumeration: the
checkered cloths of the counting houses served as simple
data structures for enumerating stacks of coins, by weight.
A more arithmetic-oriented machine is the abacus. One of Apple II
the earliest machines of this type was the Chinese abacus.

First mechanical calculators

In 1623 Wilhelm Schickard built the first
mechanical calculator and thus became
the father of the computing era.
Since his machine used techniques such
as cogs and gears first developed for
clocks, it was also called a 'calculating Gears are at the heart
clock'. It was put to practical use by his of mechanical devices
friend Johannes Kepler, who like the Curta calculator

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
revolutionized astronomy.
Machines by Blaise Pascal (the Pascaline, 1642) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
(1671) followed. Around 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas created the first successful,
mass-produced mechanical calculator, the Thomas
Arithmometer, that could add, subtract, multiply, and
divide. It was mainly based on Leibniz's work. Mechanical
calculators, like the base-ten addiator, the comptometer,
the Monroe, the Curta and the Addo-X remained in use until
the 1970s.
Leibniz also described the binary numeral system, a central
ingredient of all modern computers. However, up to the
1940s, many subsequent designs (including Charles
Babbage's machines of the 1800s and even ENIAC of 1945)
were based on the harder-to-implement decimal system. Mechanical calculator
from 1914
John Napier noted that multiplication and division of
numbers can be performed by addition and subtraction, respectively, of logarithms of
those numbers. Since these real numbers can be represented as distances or intervals
on a line, the slide rule allowed multiplication and division operations to be carried
significantly faster than was previously possible. Slide rules were used by generations
of engineers and other
mathematically inclined
professional workers, until the
invention of the pocket
calculator. The engineers in the
Apollo program to send a man to
the moon made many of their
calculations on slide rules, which
were accurate to 3 or 4 The slide rule, a basic mechanical calculator,
significant figures. facilitates multiplication and division

While producing the first logarithmic tables Napier needed to perform many
multiplications and it was at this point that he designed Napier's bones.

Unisys ICON
Macintosh 128k

1801: punched card technology

In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a loom in which
the pattern being woven was controlled by punched cards.
The series of cards could be changed without changing the
mechanical design of the loom. This was a landmark point in
programmability.
In 1833, Charles Babbage moved on from developing his
difference engine to developing a more complete design, the
analytical engine which would draw directly on Jacquard's
punch cards for its programming. Herman Hollerith
invented a tabulating
In 1890, the United States Census Bureau used punch cards machine using punch
and sorting machines designed by Herman Hollerith to handle cards in the 1880s.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
the flood of data from the decennial census mandated by the Constitution. Hollerith's
company eventually became the core of IBM. IBM
developed punch card technology into a powerful tool
for business data processing and produced an
extensive line of specialized unit record equipment.
By 1950 the IBM card had become ubiquitous in
industry and government. The warning printed on
most cards, "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate", became
a motto for the post-World War II era.
Leslie Comrie's articles on punch card methods and
W.J. Eckert's publication of Punched Card Methods in
Scientific Computation in 1940, described techniques
which were sufficiently advanced to solve differential
equations, perform multiplication and division using
floating point representations, all on punched cards
and plug-boards similar to those used by telephone
operators. The Thomas J. Watson Astronomical
Computing Bureau, Columbia University performed Charles Babbage
astronomical calculations representing the state of the
art in computing.
In many computer installations, punched cards were used until (and after) the end of
the 1970s. For example, science and engineering students at many universities around
the world would submit their programming assignments to the local computer centre in
the form of a stack of cards, one card per program line, and then had to wait for the
program to be queued for processing, compiled, and executed. In due course a
printout of any results, marked with the submitter's identification, would be placed in
an output tray outside the computer center. In many cases these results would
comprise solely a printout of error messages regarding program syntax etc.,
necessitating another edit-compile-run cycle.
Punched cards are still used and manufactured in the current century, and their
distinctive dimensions (and 80-column capacity) can still be recognised in forms,
records, and programs around the world.

1835-1900s: first programmable machines

The defining feature of a "universal computer" is programmability, which allows the
computer to emulate any other calculating machine by changing a stored sequence of
instructions.
In 1835 Charles Babbage described his analytical engine. It was the plan of a general-
purpose programmable computer, employing punch cards for input and a steam engine
for power. One crucial invention was to use gears for the function served by the beads
of an abacus. In a real sense, computers all contain automatic abacuses (technically
called the ALU or floating-point unit).
His initial idea was to use punch-cards to control a machine that could calculate and
print logarithmic tables with huge precision (a specific purpose machine). Babbage's
idea soon developed into a general-purpose programmable computer, his analytical
engine.
While his design was sound and the plans were
probably correct, or at least debuggable, the project
was slowed by various problems. Babbage was a
difficult man to work with and argued with anyone
who didn´t respect his ideas. All the parts for his
machine had to be made by hand and small errors in
each item were summed up as huge discrepancies in
a machine with thousands of parts. The project
dissolved over disputes with the artisan who built
parts and was ended with the depletion of
government funding.
Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, translated and
added notes to the "Sketch of the Analytical Engine"
by Federico Luigi, Conte Menabrea. She has become
closely associated with Babbage. Some claim she is
the world's first computer programmer, however this
claim and the value of her other contributions are
disputed by many.
A reconstruction of the Difference Engine II, an
earlier, more limited design, has been operational Augusta Ada King, Countess
since 1991 at the London Science Museum. With a of Lovelace

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
few trivial changes, it works as Babbage designed it and shows that Babbage was right
in theory.
The museum used computer-operated machine tools to construct the necessary parts,
following tolerances which a machinist of the period would have been able to achieve.
Some feel that the technology of the time was unable to produce parts of sufficient
precision, though this appears to be false. The failure of Babbage to complete the
engine can be chiefly attributed to difficulties not only related to politics and financing,
but also to his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer. Today, many
in the computer field term this sort of obsession creeping featuritis.
Following in the footsteps of Babbage, although unaware of his earlier work, was Percy
Ludgate, an accountant from Dublin, Ireland. He independently designed a
programmable mechanical computer, which he described in a work that was published
in 1909.

1930s-1960s: desktop calculators

By the 1900s earlier mechanical calculators, cash registers, accounting machines, and
so on were redesigned to use electric motors, with gear position as the representation
for the state of a variable. Companies like Friden, Marchant and Monroe made desktop
mechanical calculators from the 1930s that could add, subtract, multiply and divide.
The word "computer" was a job title assigned to people who used these calculators to
perform mathematical calculations. During the Manhattan project, future Nobel
laureate Richard Feynman was the supervisor of the roomful of human computers,
many of them women mathematicians, who understood the differential equations
which were being solved for the war effort. Even the renowned Stanislaw Marcin Ulam
was pressed into service to translate the mathematics into computable approximations
for the hydrogen bomb, after the war.
In 1948, the Curta was introduced. This was a small, portable, mechanical calculator
that was about the size of a pepper grinder. Over time, during the 1950s and 1960s a
variety of different brands of mechanical calculator appeared on the market.
The first desktop electronic calculator was probably Sumlock Comptometer's 1961
Anita C/VIII, which used a Nixie tube display and 177 subminiature thyratron tubes. In
June 1963, Friden introduced the four-function EC-130. It had an all-transistor design,
13-digit capacity on a 5-inch CRT, and introduced reverse Polish notation (RPN) to the
calculator market at a price of $2200. The model EC-132 added square root and
reciprocal functions. In 1965, Wang Laboratories produced the LOCI-2, a 10-digit
transistorized desktop calculator that used a Nixie tube display and could compute
logarithms.
With development of the integrated circuits and microprocessors, the expensive, large
calculators were replaced with smaller electronic devices.

Pre-1940 analog computers

Before World War II, mechanical and electrical analog computers were considered the
'state of the art', and many thought they were the future of computing. Analog
computers use continuously varying amounts of physical quantities, such as voltages
or currents, or the rotational speed of shafts, to represent the quantities being
processed. An ingenious example of such a machine was the Water integrator built in
1936. Unlike modern digital computers, analog computers are not very flexible, and
need to be reconfigured (i.e., reprogrammed) manually to switch them from working
on one problem to another. Analog computers had an advantage over early digital
computers in that they could be used to solve complex problems while the earliest
attempts at digital computers were quite limited. But as digital computers have
become faster and used larger memory (e.g., RAM or internal store), they have almost
entirely displaced analog computers, and computer programming, or coding has arisen
as another human profession.
Since computers were rare in this era, the solutions were often hard-coded into paper
forms such as graphs and nomograms, which could then allow analog solutions to
problems, such as the distribution of pressures and temperatures in a heating system.
Some of the most widely deployed analog computers included devices for aiming
weapons, such as the Norden bombsight and artillery aiming computers for battleships.
Some of these stayed in use for decades after WWII.
Hybrid analog computers, controlled by digital electronics, remained in substantial use
into the 1950s and 1960s, and later in some specialised applications.

1940s: first electrical digital computers

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
The era of modern computing began with a flurry of development before and during
World War II, as electronic circuits, relays, capacitors and vacuum tubes replaced
mechanical equivalents and digital calculations replaced analog calculations. The
computers designed and constructed then have sometimes been called 'first
generation' computers. First generation computers such as the Atanasoff-Berry
Computer, Z3 and Colossus were built by hand using circuits containing relays or
vacuum valves (tubes), and often used punched cards or punched paper tape for input
and as the main (non-volatile) storage medium. Temporary, or working storage, was
provided by acoustic delay lines (which use the propagation time of sound in a medium
such as wire to store data) or by Williams tubes (which use the ability of a television
picture tube to store and retrieve data). By 1954, magnetic core memory was rapidly
displacing most other forms of temporary storage, and dominated the field through the
mid-1970s.
In this era, a number of different machines were produced with steadily advancing
capabilities. At the beginning of this period, nothing remotely resembling a modern
computer existed, except in the long-lost plans of Charles Babbage and the
mathematical musings of Alan Turing and others. At the end of the era, devices like
the EDSAC had been built, and are universally agreed to be digital computers. Defining
a single point in the series as the "first computer" misses many subtleties.
Alan Turing's 1936 paper has proved enormously influential in computing and
computer science in two ways. Its main purpose was an elegant proof that there were
problems (namely the halting problem) that could not be solved by a mechanical
process (a computer). In doing so, however, Turing provided a definition of what a
universal computer is: a construct called the Turing machine, a purely theoretical
device invented to formalize the notion of algorithm execution, replacing Kurt Gödel's
more cumbersome universal language based on arithmetics. Modern computers are
Turing-complete (i.e., equivalent algorithm execution capability to a universal Turing
machine), except for their finite memory. This limited type of Turing completeness is
sometimes viewed as a threshold capability separating general-purpose computers
from their special-purpose predecessors.
However, as will be seen, theoretical Turing-completeness is a long way from a
practical universal computing device. To be a practical general-purpose computer,
there must be some convenient way to input new programs into the computer, such as
punched tape. For full versatility, the Von Neumann architecture uses the same
memory both to store programs and data; virtually all contemporary computers use
this architecture (or some variant). Finally, while it is theoretically possible to
implement a full computer entirely mechanically (as Babbage's design showed),
electronics made possible the speed and later the miniaturization that characterises
modern computers.
There were three parallel streams of computer development in the World War II era,
and two were either largely ignored or were deliberately kept secret. The first was the
German work of Konrad Zuse. The second was the secret development of the Colossus
computer in the UK. Neither of these had much influence on the various computing
projects in the United States. After the war, British and American computing
researchers cooperated on some of the most important steps towards a practical
computing device.

American developments
In 1937, Claude Shannon produced his master's thesis at MIT that implemented
Boolean algebra using electronic relays and switches for the first time in history.
Entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, Shannon's thesis
essentially founded practical digital circuit design.
In November of 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs, completed a relay-
based computer he dubbed the "Model K" (for "kitchen", where he had assembled it),
which calculated using binary addition. Bell Labs thus authorized a full research
program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their Complex Number Calculator,
completed January 8, 1940, was able to calculate complex numbers. In a
demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College
on September 11, 1940, Stibitz was able to send the Complex Number Calculator
remote commands over telephone lines by a teletype. It was the first computing
machine ever used remotely over a phone line. Some participants of the conference
who witnessed the demonstration were John Von Neumann, John Mauchly, and Norbert
Wiener, who wrote about it in his memoirs.
In 1938 John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University
developed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), a special purpose electronic computer
for solving systems of linear equations. The design used over 300 vacuum tubes for
high speed and employed capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory.
Though the ABC machine was not programmable, it was the first modern computer in
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
several other respects, including the first to use binary math and electronic circuits.
ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly visited the ABC while it was still under construction in
June 1941, and its influence over the design of the ENIAC is a matter of contention
among computer historians. The ABC was largely forgotten until it became the focus of
the lawsuit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, which invalidated the ENIAC patent.
In 1939, development began at IBM's Endicott laboratories on the Harvard Mark I.
Known officially as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, the Mark I was a
general purpose electro-mechanical computer built with IBM financing and with
assistance from some IBM personnel under the direction of Harvard mathematician
Howard Aiken. Its design was influenced by the Analytical Engine. It was a decimal
machine which used storage wheels and rotary switches in addition to electromagnetic
relays. It was programmable by punched paper tape, and contained several calculators
working in parallel. Later models contained several paper tape readers and the
machine could switch between readers based
on a condition. Nevertheless, this does not
quite make the machine Turing-complete. The
Mark I was moved to Harvard University to
begin operation in May 1944.
The US-built ENIAC (Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Computer), often called the
first electronic general-purpose computer,
publicly validated the use of electronics for
large-scale computing. This was crucial for the
development of modern computing, initially
because of the enormous speed advantage,
but ultimately because of the potential for
miniaturization. Built under the direction of ENIAC performed ballistics trajectory
John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, it was calculations with 160 kW of power.
1,000 times faster than its contemporaries. Source: U.S. Army Photo, from K.
ENIAC's development and construction lasted Kempf.
from 1941 to full operation at the end of 1945.
When its design was proposed, many researchers believed that the thousands of
delicate valves (i.e. vacuum tubes) would burn out often enough that the ENIAC would
be so frequently down for repairs as to be useless. It was, however, capable of up to
thousands of operations per second for hours at a time between valve failures.
ENIAC was unambiguously a Turing-complete device. To 'program' ENIAC, however,
meant to rewire it--some say this does not even qualify as programming, otherwise
any type of rebuilding some limited computer might be viewed as programming. At the
time, however, unaided calculation was seen as enough of a triumph to view the
solution of a single problem as the object of a program. (Improvements completed in
1948 made it possible to execute stored programs set in function table memory, which
made programming less a one-off effort, and more systematic.)
Jon von Neumann, based on ideas developed by Eckhart and Mauchly after recognising
the limitations of ENIAC, wrote a widely-circulated report describing a computer design
(the EDVAC design) in which the programs and working data were both stored in a
single, unified store. This basic design, which became known as the von Neumann
architecture, would serve as the basis for the development of the first really flexible,
general-purpose digital computers.

Colossus
During World War II, the British at Bletchley Park achieved a number of successes at
breaking encrypted German military communications. The German encryption
machine, Enigma, was attacked with the help of electro-mechanical machines called
bombes. The bombe, designed by Alan Turing
and Gordon Welchman, after Polish bomba,
ruled out possible Enigma settings by
performing chains of logical deductions
implemented electrically. Most possibilities led
to a contradiction, and the few remaining
could be tested by hand.
The Germans also developed a series of
teleprinter encryption systems, quite different
from Enigma. The Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine
was used for high-level Army communications,
termed "Tunny" by the British. The first
intercepts of Lorenz messages began in 1941. Colossus was used to break German
As part of an attack on Tunny, Professor Max ciphers during World War II
Newman and his colleagues helped specify the
Colossus. The Mk I Colossus was built in 11 months by Tommy Flowers and his
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
colleagues at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in London and then shipped
to Bletchley Park.
Colossus was the first totally electronic computing device. The Colossus used a large
number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being
configured to perform a variety of boolean logical operations on its data, but it was not
Turing-complete. Nine Mk II Colossi were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II
making ten machines in total). Details of their existence, design, and use were kept
secret well into the 1970s. Winston Churchill personally issued an order for their
destruction into pieces no larger than a man's hand. Due to this secrecy the Colossi
were not included in many histories of computing. A reconstructed copy of one of the
Colossus machines is now on display at Bletchley Park.

Konrad Zuse's Z-series

Working in isolation in Nazi Germany, Konrad Zuse started construction in 1936 of his
first Z-series calculators featuring memory and
(initially limited) programmability. Zuse's
purely mechanical, but already binary Z1,
finished in 1938, never worked reliably due to
problems with the precision of parts.
Zuse's subsequent machine, the Z3, was
finished in 1941. It was based on telephone
relays and did work satisfactorily. The Z3 thus
became the first functional program-controlled
computer. In many ways it was quite similar
to modern machines, pioneering numerous
advances, such as floating point numbers. A reproduction of Zuse's Z1
Replacement of the hard-to-implement computer
decimal system (used in Charles Babbage's
earlier design) by the simpler binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier
to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at that time.
This is sometimes viewed as the main reason why Zuse succeeded where Babbage
failed.
Programs were fed into Z3 on punched films. Conditional jumps were missing, but
since the 1990s it has been proved theoretically that Z3 was still a universal computer
(ignoring its physical storage size limitations). In two 1937 patents, Konrad Zuse also
anticipated that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for
data - the key insight of what became known as the Von Neumann architecture and
was first implemented in the later British EDSAC design (1949). Zuse also claimed to
have designed the first higher-level programming language, (Plankalkül), in 1945,
although it was never formally published until 1971, and was implemented for the first
time in 2000 by the Free University of Berlin -- five years after Zuse died.
Zuse suffered setbacks during World War II when some of his machines were
destroyed in the course of Allied bombing campaigns. Apparently his work remained
largely unknown to engineers in the UK and US until much later, although at least IBM
was aware of it as it financed his post-war startup company in 1946 in return for an
option on Zuse's patents.

First generation von Neumann machines

The first working von Neumann machine was the Manchester "Baby" or Small-Scale
Experimental Machine, built at the University of Manchester in 1948; it was followed in
1949 by the Manchester Mark I computer which functioned as a complete system using
the Williams tube for memory, and also introduced index registers. The other
contender for the title "first digital stored program computer" was EDSAC, designed
and constructed at the University of Cambridge. Operational less than one year after
the Manchester "Baby", it was capable of tackling real problems. EDSAC was actually
inspired by plans for EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), the
successor of ENIAC; these plans were already in place by the time the ENIAC was
successfully operational. Unlike the ENIAC, which used parallel processing, EDVAC
used a single processing unit. This design was simpler and was the first to be
implemented in each succeeding wave of miniaturization, and increased reliability.
Some view Manchester Mark I / EDSAC / EDVAC as the "Eves" from which nearly all
current computers derive their architecture.
The first universal programmable computer in continental Europe was created by a
team of scientists under direction of Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev from Kiev Institute of
Electrotechnology, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). The computer MESM (possibly standing
for Small Electronic Calculating Machine) became operational in 1950. It had about
6,000 vacuum tubes and consumed 25 kW of power. It could perform approximately

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
3,000 operations per second. Another early machine was CSIRAC, an Australian design
that ran its first test program in 1949.
In October 1947, the directors of J. Lyons & Company, a British catering company
famous for its teashops but with strong interests in new office management
techniques, decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of
computers. By 1951 the LEO I computer was operational and ran the world's first
regular routine office computer job.
Manchester University's machine became the
prototype for the Ferranti Mark I. The first Ferranti
Mark I machine was delivered to the University in
February, 1951 and at least nine others were sold
between 1951 and 1957.
In June 1951, the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic
Computer) was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the
machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM
UNIVAC I, the first
UNIVAC". Remington Rand eventually sold 46
commercial electronic
machines at more than $1 million each. UNIVAC was
computer, achieved 1900
the first 'mass produced' computer; all predecessors
operations per second in a
had been 'one-off' units. It used 5,200 vacuum tubes
smaller and more efficient
and consumed 125 kW of power. It used a mercury
package than ENIAC
delay line capable of storing 1,000 words of 11
decimal digits plus sign (72-bit words) for memory.
Unlike earlier machines it did not use a punch card system but a metal tape input.
In November 1951, the J. Lyons company began weekly operation of a bakery
valuations job on the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office). This was the first business
application to go live on a stored program computer.
In 1952, IBM publicly announced the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, the
first in its successful 700/7000 series and its first IBM mainframe computer. The IBM
704, introduced in 1954, used magnetic core memory, which became the standard for
large machines. The first implemented high-level general purpose programming
language, Fortran, was also being developed at IBM for the 704 during 1955 and 1956
and released in early 1957. (Konrad Zuse's 1945 design of the high-level language
Plankalkül was not implemented at that time.)
IBM introduced a smaller, more affordable computer in 1954 that proved very popular.
The IBM 650 weighed over 900 kg, the attached power supply
weighed around 1350 kg and both were held in separate
cabinets of roughly 1.5 meters by 0.9 meters by 1.8 meters.
It cost $500,000 or could be leased for $3,500 a month. Its
drum memory was originally only 2000 ten-digit words, and
required arcane programming for efficient computing. Memory
limitations such as this were to dominate programming for
decades afterward, until the evolution of a programming
model which was more sympathetic to software development.
In 1955, Maurice Wilkes invented microprogramming, which
was later widely used in the CPUs and floating-point units of
mainframe and other computers, such as the IBM 360 series.
Microprogramming allows the base instruction set to be Maurice Wilkes
defined or extended by built-in programs (now sometimes realised that basic
called firmware, microcode, or millicode). and frequently used
In 1956, IBM sold its first magnetic disk system, RAMAC operations could be
(Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). It used programmed directly
50 24-inch metal disks, with 100 tracks per side. It could into hardware
store 5 megabytes of data and cost $10,000 per megabyte.
(As of 2005, disk storage costs less than $1 per gigabyte).

1950s and early 1960s: second generation

The next major step in the history of computing was the invention of the transistor in
1947. This replaced the fragile and power hungry valves with a much smaller and more
reliable component. Transistorized computers are normally referred to as 'Second
Generation' and dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s. By using transistors and
printed circuits a significant decrease in size and power consumption was achieved,
along with an increase in reliability. For example, the transistorized IBM 1620, which
replaced the bulky IBM 650, was the size of an office desk. Second generation
computers were still expensive and were primarily used by universities, governments,
and large corporations.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
In 1959 IBM shipped the transistor-based IBM
7090 mainframe and medium scale IBM 1401.
The latter was designed around punch card
input and proved a popular general purpose
computer. Some 12,000 were shipped, making
it the most successful machine in computer
history at the time. It used a magnetic core
memory of 4000 characters (later expanded to
16,000 characters). Many aspects of its design
were based Transistors, above, revolutionized
on the desire computers as smaller and more
to replace efficient replacements for vacuum
punched card tubes
machines
which were in wide use from the 1920s through the
early 1970s.
In 1960 IBM shipped the smaller, transistor-based
IBM 1620, originally with only punched paper tape,
but soon upgraded to punch cards. It proved a
popular scientific computer and about 2,000
were shipped. Digital Equipment It used a magnetic core memory of up
to 60,000 Corporation's first computer decimal digits.
Also in 1960, was the PDP-1 DEC launched the PDP-1 their first
machine It was built mostly of DEC intended for use by technical staff in
laboratories 1000-series system modules, and for research.
using Micro-Alloy and Micro-
In 1961, Burroughs released the B5000 the first
dual Alloy-Diffused Transistors processor and virtual memory
computer. Other unique features were a stack
architecture, descriptor-based addressing, and no programming directly in assembly
language.
In 1962, Sperry Rand shipped the UNIVAC 1107, one of the first machines with a
general register set and the base of the successful UNIVAC 1100 series.
In 1964 IBM announced the S/360 series, which was the first family of computers that
could run the same software at different combinations of speed, capacity and price. It
also pioneered the commercial use of microprograms, and an extended instruction set
designed for processing many types of data, not just arithmetic. In addition, it unified
IBM's product line, which prior to that time had included both a "commercial" product
line and a separate "scientific" line. The software provided with System/360 also
included major advances, including commercially available multi-programming, new
programming languages, and independence of programs from input/output devices.
Over 14,000 System/360 systems were shipped by 1968.
Also in 1964, DEC launched the PDP-8 much smaller machine intended for use by
technical staff in laboratories and for research.

Post-1960: third generation and beyond

The explosion in the use of computers began with 'Third
Generation' computers. These relied on Jack St. Clair Kilby's
and Robert Noyce's independent invention of the integrated
circuit (or microchip), which later led to Ted Hoff's invention
of the microprocessor, at Intel.
During the 1960s there was considerable overlap between
second and third generation technologies. As late as 1975,
The microscopic
Sperry Univac continued the manufacture of second-
integrated circuit,
generation machines such as the UNIVAC 494.
above, combined
The microprocessor led to the development of the many hundreds of
microcomputer, small, low-cost computers that could be transistors into one
owned by individuals and small businesses. Microcomputers, unit for fabrication
the first of which appeared in the 1970s, became ubiquitous
in the 1980s and beyond. Computing has evolved with microcomputer architectures,
with features added from their larger brethren, now dominant in most market
segments.

Links
History of Programming Languages
History of Computer Games
History of Operating Systems
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70
History of Word Processors
History of Microprocessors
History of Sound Cards
History of the Floppy Disk
History of the Hard Disk
Tally Stick
Abacus
Slide Rule
Curta Mechanical Calculator
Pascalina Mechanical Calculator
Wilhelm Schickard
Punched Card
Charles Babbage
Ada Lovelace
ENIAC
EDVAC
PDP-1
PDP-8
George Stibitz
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computers

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage%2C_Charles
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=69
http://www.computernostalgia.net/listDocumentsPageOutline.php?documentID=70