From stones and sticks to bits and bytes,the saga of computers

                                                                     

                                                                The above images represent the journey of humans of finding the first number systems up to the modern world of computers.You might wonder if such simple ideas have evolved up to so complex things which are the building blocks for the prosperity    of  our era.I enjoyed studying this history of how the evolution of computation happened and I am going to share some of the key milestones of that period with you as well as how might our future will be shaped by the future trends in computing.

1.1 Early history of computing

The history of computation goes back thousands of years in human history. People began counting before inventing any number system. It was crucial part of their lives. The purpose of computing was to keep records of various activities that were important for their survival. For example, a shepherd would count his sheep by matching each sheep with a stone when he take them to feed and this helped him to count them back when they return home. Gradually various civilizations came up with their own number systems and counting mechanisms. Evidence for number systems could be found in very early civilizations such as Babylonian, Egyptian and Mayans. After different societies started dealing with each other (mainly for trade purposes) each number system began enriching and gradually Hindu-Arabic number system as we know it today became the most accepted. It took a few more centuries to evolve this simple number system to a knowledge system known as mathematics today. Various mathematicians discovered and invented rules, processes and limitations in place to enhance the breath, accuracy and speed of computing power. However with the industrial revolution and the progress of technology, the demand for faster and more accurate computing came to the forefront like never before. In a period spanning not even a century, humans have achieved exponential growth in computing power and along with it grew an enormous spectrum of data. With the rapid development of computer technology, computing and manipulation of data has become the back bone of our civilization. without the aid of calculating machines or rather computers, world can’t survive for a day since almost every machine need instructions to operate and the only language they can understood is machine language consists of ones and zeros. People began counting even before they form societies or cities. The techniques were simple but sufficient for their needs. Early people only needed numbers to keep track of their resources like number of their cows, cattle, sheep etc. They simply used their fingers of their hands to match each of the units they wanted to count and if the fingers weren’t enough, they used pebbles or other similar objects to count. These methods were efficient when the number of things to count is small in quantity. But as the things get more complex, people needed faster and more reliable methods for calculation.

1.2   Invention of Abacus

(Figure1.2-Image retrieved from www.computerworld.com)

The use of Abacus spread quite rapidly among people because of it’s capability to do arithmetic far better than any other means used beforehand. The modern version of Abacus was invented in China around 1200 A.D. (A brief history of the abacus, 2013).Russia, Japan, Greece and Aztecs are the other countries and tribes that used abacus (different methods than China) for the calculations. Its ability to handle more numbers, efficiency in counting and keeping records and also the ability to use it for simple arithmetic like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division were some of the advantages of using abacus. Although it’s a mechanical device, it couldn’t do calculations by itself like calculators or computers these days, all calculations had to be done by the operator and it helped him to visualize the ongoing calculation in his mind. So the accuracy of the calculation was completely depended on the human factor.

1.3 The Pascal machine(Pascaline)

(Figure 1.3 Image retrieved from http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk)

Pascal machine was invented by famous French mathematician Blasé Pascal .It was the first successful mechanical calculating machine in 17th century. (Dave, 2007).It was a machine capable of only addition but it could perform subtraction, multiplication and division when considered subtraction as the complement of addition and multiplication as a repeated addition and division as repeated subtraction. Pascaline was consisting of rotating wheels, gears and dials and wood parts.

The purpose of the machine was to be used in tax collection. Pascal had to solve many problems due to the nature of the currency of France. Above all, the Pascaline wasn’t a very successful invention .The mechanism of the machine was a good one but to get considerable amount of accuracy, it had to be handled with great care. So eventually the reliability of the results was depend on the operator.

1.4 The Analytical machine

(Figure 3.2.1,Image retrieved from www.pcmag.com)

The analytical engine is considered as the first model of the modern electronic computer. This machine was an improvement of a previous invention called difference engine of Charles Babbage who is considered as the father of modern computing because of his innovative ideas on computing. Babbage designed this machine to be used as a programmable machine that can be customized according to the requirement rather than building machines that could only execute a specific set of instructions. Another similarity of this with digital computer was that there were separated areas for different tasks like executing commands, processing data and storing outputs and intermediate results. A punch card system was used to feed the data into it and results were displayed as plots. (The machines were intended to use for calculations of polynomials). Ada Lovelace got the chance to be the first computer programmer in history by programming the analytical engine. Besides her contribution to program the machine she had a vision that one day the machines like these can be programmed to do much more things other than mire mathematical calculations. These machines all were completely mechanical devices which weren’t even close to modern electronic computers. But the new concepts discovered along with these machines like the logical structure of a computer, separate storing of data from processing unit and the input and output methods still are accepted and valuable in computing. These machines provided the basic foundations for the early computing devices. There were some other important milestones in mechanical devices history. In 1890 the census office of America used a mechanical tabulator for the census purposes which was designed by Herman Hollerith. They were able to complete the census only in one year otherwise would take about 7 years to complete. This showed the power of artificial devices in computing and the advantages of using them in complex calculations.

I’m hoping to continue the next era of computer age ,The inception and evolution of digital computers by the next post.