This Blog provides a history of the computers, its inventors, the internet and to the Venture Capitalist that saw a business in these new medium
To understand how this machine became a billion dollar business and how it works, we have to go back to the beginning – on how this all started.
We have to go way back were - there were no transistors, Integrated Chips or even Vacuum Tubes. We have to go back in history when Blaise Pascal builds a mechanical calculator in 1642
This mechanical calculator had the capacity for eight digit calculation - but had a lot of problems - it had trouble carrying and its gears tend to jam[1].
Pascal conceived the mechanical calculator while trying to help his father who had been assigned the task of reorganizing the tax revenues of the French province of Haute-Normandie ; first called Arithmetic Machine, Pascal's Calculator and later Pascaline, it could add and subtract directly and multiply and divide by repetition.
Pascal went through 50 prototypes before presenting his first machine to the public in 1645. He dedicated it to Pierre Séguier, the chancellor of France at the time. He built around twenty more machines during the next decade, often improving on his original design. Nine machines have survived the centuries, most of them being on display in European museums. In 1649 a royal privilege, signed by Louis XIV of France, gave him the exclusivity of the design and manufacturing of calculating machines in France
See display below for the Pascal Calculator:
The introduction of the Pascal calculators - launched the development of mechanical calculators in Europe first and then all over the world. This development - culminated three centuries later, by the invention of the microprocessor developed for a Busicom calculator in 1971. Refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal’s_calculator
The First ProgramIn 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard, a silk-weaver, invented an improved textile loom. Known as the Jacquard loom - it was the first machine to use punched card. These punched cards controlled the weaving, enabling an ordinary workman to produce the most beautiful patterns in a style previously accomplished only with patience, skill, and hard work.[2]
See figure below.
The loom is controlled by punched cards with punched holes, each row of which corresponds to one row of the design. Multiple rows of holes are punched on each card and the many cards that compose the design of the textile are strung together in order. It is based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques Vaucanson (1740)[4]
[1]A HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER: PREHISTORY; http://www.pbs.org/nerds/timeline/pre.html
[2] JACQUARD LOOM; http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/jacquard.htm
[3] Jacquard.loom.cards; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jacquard.loom.cards.jpg
Harsh Busines competition:
Jacquard's technology was a real boon to mill owners, but put many loom operators out of work. Angry mobs smashed Jacquard looms and once attacked Jacquard himself. History is full of examples of labor unrest following technological innovation yet most studies show that, overall, technology has actually increased the number of jobs. Go to link: http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HistoryPt2.htm
Charles Babbage - good with numbers and anything mechanical:
In 1820 or 1821 and English mathematician and engineer – Charles Babbage invented the "Difference Engine" - a massive steam-powered mechanical calculator designed to print astronomical tables. Babbage had another invention called the “Analytical Engine” – however, he did not live to see his invention come to fruition.
The Analytical was undoubtedly the first design for what we now think of as a computer: a machine that takes an input, mathematically manipulates it according to a customizable program, and produces an output.
The figure above is the reconstruction of Babbage's difference engine at the London Science Museum
Babbage sought a way to remove human errors from the mathematical tables available in the early 19th century, devising his mechanical 'difference engine' to calculate polynomial functions (a type of algebra equation). Though it was never finished, the first difference engine would have contained more than 25,000 parts and weighed over 13 tons. A revised design was completed in 1991 by the Science Museum, and found to work perfectly.
More complex still, and also unfinished, Babbage's analytical engine added features that define modern computers. It could be programmed with cards, but could also store the results of calculations and perform new calculations on those. Babbage intended to support conditional branches and loops, fundamental to all modern programming languages. His death in 1871 meant that he never finalized his designs for the engine, but his son Henry completed its core computing unit – 'the mill' – in 1888.
No comments:
Post a Comment