The calculations), and an output (a printing mechanism)-the same basicĬomponents shared by all modern computers. Were taking place), a processor (the number-cruncher that carried out Memory (something to store these numbers while complex calculations Many regard Babbage as the "father of the computer"īecause his machines had an input (a way of feeding in numbers), a Grumpy English mathematician named Charles Babbage The first person to attempt this was a rather obsessive, notoriously Picture courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office. Statistics gathered about people in the US census. Showing how a strip of paper (yellow) is punched with different patterns of holes (orange) that correspond to Here's a drawing from his 1889 patentĪrt of Compiling Statistics (US Patent#395,782), Photo: Punched cards: Herman Hollerith perfected the way of using punched cardsĪnd paper tape to store information and feed it into a machine. Making entirely automatic, programmable calculators. Calculators evolved into computers when people devised ways of
#Abacus picture series
Series of stored instructions called a program (a kind of mathematical That can operate automatically, without any human help, by following a
A computer, on the other hand, is a machine A calculator is aĭevice that makes it quicker and easier for people to do sums-but it Pascal and Leibniz really qualified as computers. Neither the abacus, nor the mechanical calculators constructed by Picture courtesy of US Library of Congress. Left: The "user interface": the part where you dial in numbers you want to calculate. To use them (find out more in our articles about calculatorsĪrtwork: Pascaline: Two details of Blaise Pascal's 17th-century calculator. It would takeĪnother 50–100 years for mathematicians and computer scientists to figure out how But, in the 19thĬentury, these ideas were still far ahead of their time.
#Abacus picture code
New branch of mathematics called Boolean algebra.īinary code and Boolean algebra allow computers to make simpleĭecisions by comparing long strings of zeros and ones. George Boole (1815–1864) used the idea to invent a In 1854, a little over a century after Leibniz had died, Englishman Representing any decimal number using only the two digits zero and one.Īlthough Leibniz made no use of binary in his own calculator, it set To computing: he was the man who invented binary code, a way of Another pioneering feature was the first memoryĪpart from developing one of the world's earliest mechanicalĬalculators, Leibniz is remembered for another important contribution Well as adding and subtracting, it could multiply, divide, and work out The Leibniz machine could do much more than Pascal's: as "stepped drum" (a cylinder with teeth of increasing length around itsĮdge), an innovation that survived in mechanical calculators for 300 Severalĭecades later, in 1671, German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) came up withĪ similar but more advanced machine. Outer edges) that could add and subtract decimal numbers. The machine had a series of interlocking cogs ( gear wheels with teeth around their Pascal (1623–1666) invented the first practical mechanicalĬalculator, the Pascaline, to help his tax-collector father do his Only 18, French scientist and philosopher Blaise Middle East circa 500 BC, that it remained the fastest form ofĬalculator until the middle of the 17th century. It is a measure of the brilliance of the abacus, invented in the