The humble abacus is the first tool that most closely mimics what computers do for us today to perform smaller or subsequent calculations on a different part of the abacus The abacus saw use for centuries It is much less commonly used these days within labs or offices but kindergarten or grade school class rooms might still use it to demonstrate some low er-level math concepts An early form of the slide rule often regarded as the first successful analog calculator was devel 8
Early Computers ANTIKYTHERA ANOMALY One bizarre example of early tools is the Antikythera Mechanism This device was aboard a ship that sank off the coast of Greece around 1000 BCE The vari ous dials and gears on its surface look complicated but historians are unsure of its true purpose Some believe the Greeks used it for astronomical calcu lations The Antikythera Mechanism is an anomaly because we can’t seem to trace a clear line of pre decessors or successors to its technology in ancient history It wasn’t until the 1500s CE that something remotely as sophisticated as this device was created An aged damaged piece of the Antikythera Mechanism from the Archaeological Museum in Athens 9
The Evolution of Computer Technology oped in 1620 by the English mathematician Edmund Gunter The slide rule was originally used to multiply or divide numbers Between 1642 and 1644 French mathemati cian and scientist Blaise Pascal created a calculator called the Pascaline He connected a gear system of multiple wheels and cogs to represent scales of ten the ones place the tens place the hundreds place and so on The positioning of each cog is how it stored data just as bead positions stored data on an abacus The Pascaline allowed a greater scope of pos sible calculations than the abacus In a sense it was the first mechanical calculator and it was very pop ular Yet it was soon modified by the German math ematician Gottfried Leibniz who created differential and integral calculus BABBAGE’S ENGINE AND THE BEGINNING OF MACHINERY In 1833 Charles Babbage outlined a steam-driven machine called the Analytical Engine It contained input devices storage like a hard drive a mill or a com puting unit a control unit and output devices It would 10
Early Computers have been the size of a train and contained more than 50,000 moving parts To store data Bab bage proposed that the device would punch holes into paper cards in certain configurations This way of storing data was inspired by the Jac quard loom which used a similar technique to weave silk Babbage never completed the engine despite work ing on it for nearly forty years Yet Babbage’s Analytical Engine served as a blueprint for mod ern computer devices These were initially to be gigantic inflexible completely immobile and prohibitively costly Ada King Countess of Lovelace worked with Babbage on the Analyt ical Engine She is considered the first computer programmer In the 1880s an American named Herman Holler ith worked on a multi-part machine that would count 11 11
