Early Computing
Over the course of this series, we’re going to go from bits, bytes, transistors and logic gates, all the way to Operating Systems, Virtual Reality and Robots!
Instead, we’re going to explore a range of computing topics as a discipline and a technology.
Computers are the lifeblood of today’s world.
technology-driven global change
Industrial Revolution - Mechanization
And computing technology - Electronic Age.
With billions of transistors in just your smartphones, computers can seem pretty complicated, but really, they’re just simple machines that perform complex actions through many layers of abstraction.
So in this series, we’re going break down those layers, and build up from simple 1’s and 0’s, to logic units, CPUs, operating systems, the entire internet and beyond.
By the end of this series, I hope that you can better contextualize computing’s role both in your own life and society, and how humanity's (arguably) greatest invention is just in its infancy, with its biggest impacts yet to come.
computing’s origins
abacus, invented in Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE. and astrolabe, slide rule, clocks
1613 “computer” - it was a job title.
1694. Leibniz said “... it is beneath the dignity of excellent men to waste their time in calculation when any peasant could do the work just as accurately with the aid of a machine.”
pre-computed tables
Difference Engine, Analytical Engine
But, in 1991, historians finished constructing a Difference Engine based on Babbage's drawings and writings - and it worked!
Unlike the Difference Engine, the Analytical Engine was a “general purpose computer”.
“automatic computer” – one that could guide itself through a series of operations automatically, was a huge deal, and would foreshadow computer programs.
English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote hypothetical programs for the Analytical Engine, saying, “A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis.”
“electro-mechanical”
Hollerith’s machine was roughly 10x faster than manual tabulations, and the Census was completed in just two and a half years - saving the census office millions of dollars.
Businesses began recognizing the value of computing, Hollerith founded The Tabulating Machine Company, which later merged with other machine makers in 1924 to become IBM.
