Etymology: Pre-Twentieth Century

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Etymology

The first known use of the word "computer" was in 1613 in a book called The Yong Mans
Gleanings by English writer Richard Braithwait: "I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the
best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number." It referred to
a person who carried out calculations, or computations. The word continued with the same meaning
until the middle of the 20th century. From the end of the 19th century the word began to take on its
more familiar meaning, a machine that carries out computations. [3]

History
Main article: History of computing hardware

Pre-twentieth century

The Ishango bone

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one
correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was probably a form of tally stick. Later
record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.)
which represented counts of items, probably livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay
containers.[4][5] The use of counting rods is one example.

Suanpan (the number represented on this abacus is 6,302,715,408)

The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was used in Babylonia as
early as 2400 BC. Since then, many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented.
In a medieval European counting house, a checkered cloth would be placed on a table, and markers
moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid to calculating sums of money.

The ancient Greek-designedAntikythera mechanism, dating between 150 to 100 BC, is the world's oldest
analog computer.

The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest mechanical analog "computer", according
to Derek J. de Solla Price.[6] It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in
1901 in the Antikythera wreckoff the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and
has been dated to circa 100 BC. Devices of a level of complexity comparable to that of the
Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until a thousand years later.
Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and
navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Ab Rayhn al-Brn in the early 11th
century.[7] The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BC
and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe
was effectively an analog computer capable of working out several different kinds of problems
in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer[8][9] and gearwheels was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan, Persia in 1235.[10] Ab Rayhn al-Brninvented the first
mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe,[11] an early fixed-wired knowledge
processing machine[12] with a gear train and gear-wheels,[13] circa 1000 AD.
The sector, a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, trigonometry,
multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as squares and cube roots, was
developed in the late 16th century and found application in gunnery, surveying and navigation.
The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over it
with a mechanical linkage.

A slide rule

The slide rule was invented around 16201630, shortly after the publication of the concept of
the logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide

rule development progressed, added scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes
and cube roots, as well as transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular
and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions. Aviation is one of the few fields where slide rules
are still in widespread use, particularly for solving timedistance problems in light aircraft. To save
space and for ease of reading, these are typically circular devices rather than the classic linear slide
rule shape. A popular example is the E6B.
In the 1770s Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss watchmaker, built a mechanical doll (automata) that could
write holding a quill pen. By switching the number and order of its internal wheels different letters,
and hence different messages, could be produced. In effect, it could be mechanically "programmed"
to read instructions. Along with two other complex machines, the doll is at the Muse d'Art et
d'Histoire of Neuchtel, Switzerland, and still operates.[14]
The tide-predicting machine invented by Sir William Thomson in 1872 was of great utility to
navigation in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate
predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location.
The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential
equations by integration, used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. In 1876 Lord
Kelvin had already discussed the possible construction of such calculators, but he had been stymied
by the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators.[15] In a differential analyzer, the output of
one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was
the advance that allowed these machines to work. Starting in the 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others
developed mechanical differential analyzers.

First general-purpose computing device

A portion of Babbage's Difference engine.

Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath, originated the concept of a
programmable computer. Considered the "father of the computer",[16] he conceptualized and invented
the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his revolutionary difference
engine, designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that a much more general
design, anAnalytical Engine, was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the
machine via punched cards, a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as
the Jacquard loom. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The
machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The Engine
incorporated an arithmetic logic unit,control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and
integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be
described in modern terms as Turing-complete.[17][18]
The machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his machine had to be made by
hand this was a major problem for a device with thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was
dissolved with the decision of the British Government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to
complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to difficulties not only of politics and
financing, but also to his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer and to move
ahead faster than anyone else could follow. Nevertheless, his son, Henry Babbage, completed a
simplified version of the analytical engine's computing unit (the mill) in 1888. He gave a successful
demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906.

Later Analog computers

Sir William Thomson's third tide-predicting machine design, 187981

During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly
sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem
as a basis for computation. However, these were not programmable and generally lacked the
versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers. [19]
The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir William
Thomson in 1872. The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve

differential equations by integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876


by James Thomson, the brother of the more famous Lord Kelvin.[15]
The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer, built by H.
L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MITstarting in 1927. This built on the mechanical integrators
of James Thomson and the torque amplifiers invented by H. W. Nieman. A dozen of these devices
were built before their obsolescence became obvious.
By the 1950s the success of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog
computing machines, but analog computers remain in use in some specialized applications such as
education (control systems) and aircraft (slide rule).

Digital computer development


The principle of the modern computer was first described by mathematician and
pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who set out the idea in his seminal 1936 paper,[20] On
Computable Numbers. Turing reformulated Kurt Gdel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and
computation, replacing Gdel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with the formal and
simple hypothetical devices that became known as Turing machines. He proved that some such
machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were
representable as an algorithm. He went on to prove that there was no solution to
the Entscheidungsproblem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines
is undecidable: in general, it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a given Turing machine
will ever halt.
He also introduced the notion of a 'Universal Machine' (now known as a Universal Turing machine),
with the idea that such a machine could perform the tasks of any other machine, or in other words, it
is provably capable of computing anything that is computable by executing a program stored on
tape, allowing the machine to be programmable.Von Neumann acknowledged that the central
concept of the modern computer was due to this paper.[21] Turing machines are to this day a central
object of study in theory of computation. Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory
stores, modern computers are said to be Turing-complete, which is to say, they
have algorithm execution capability equivalent to a universal Turing machine.
Electromechanical
By 1938 the United States Navy had developed an electromechanical analog computer small
enough to use aboard a submarine. This was the Torpedo Data Computer, which used trigonometry
to solve the problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. During World War II similar devices were
developed in other countries as well.

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