History of computing

History of computing

Main article: History of computing hardware

The first use of the word "computer" was recorded in 1613, referring to a person who carried out calculations, or computations, and 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]

Limited-function early computers

The Jacquard loom, on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, was one of the first programmable devices.

The history of the modern computer begins with two separate technologies, automated calculation and programmability, but no single device can be identified as the earliest computer, partly because of the inconsistent application of that term. A few devices are worth mentioning though, like some mechanical aids to computing, which were very successful and survived for centuries until the advent of the electronic calculator, like the Sumerian abacus, designed around 2500 BC^[4] which descendant won a speed competition against a modern desk calculating machine in Japan in 1946,^[5] the slide rules, invented in the 1620s, which were carried on five Apollo space missions, including to the moon^[6] and arguably the astrolabe and the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 BC.^[7] The Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD) built a mechanical theater which performed a play lasting 10 minutes and was operated by a complex system of ropes and drums that might be considered to be a means of deciding which parts of the mechanism performed which actions and when.^[8] This is the essence of programmability.
Around the end of the 10th century, the French monk Gerbert d'Aurillac brought back from Spain the drawings of a machine invented by the Moors that answered either Yes or No to the questions it was asked.^[9] Again in the 13th century, the monks Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon built talking androids without any further development (Albertus Magnus complained that he had wasted forty years of his life when Thomas Aquinas, terrified by his machine, destroyed it).^[10]
In 1642, the Renaissance saw the invention of the mechanical calculator,^[11] a device that could perform all four arithmetic operations without relying on human intelligence.^[12] The mechanical calculator was at the root of the development of computers in two separate ways. Initially, it was in trying to develop more powerful and more flexible calculators^[13] that the computer was first theorized by Charles Babbage^[14][15] and then developed.^[16] Secondly, development of a low-cost electronic calculator, successor to the mechanical calculator, resulted in the development by Intel^[17] of the first commercially available microprocessor integrated circuit.