The first computers were people. "COMPUTER" was originally a job title. It was used to describe those human beings, predominantly WOMEN whose job it was to perform the repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigational tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs.
Early Counting/Computing Tools
The key developments that took place till the first computer was developed are as follows:
ABACUS was an early aid for mathematical computations. It consists of bars in horizontal positions on which seats of beads are inserted.
NAPIER’S BONES. John Napier, a Scottish Mathematician, invented another calculating tool that used marked strips of wood or bone, side by side, to multiply and divide.
PASCALINE was a wooden box that could only add and subtract by means of a series of gears and wheels. Blaise Pascal, a French Mathematician, invented the Pascaline to help make his father’s job as a tax accountant easier.
LEIBNIZ’S CALCULATOR. The Leibnez Calculator can add, subtract, multiply, divide and find square roots of numbers. Gottfried Leibnez, a German inventor created this mechanical tool and added a crank to speed up the calculations.
JACQUARD’S LOOM was a weaving machine controlled by punch cards. Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French Silk Weaver, developed a punch card system that could recognize the presence of hole in the punched card as binary one and the absence of the hole as binary zero. The 0s and 1s are the basis of the modern digital computer.
ANALYTICAL ENGINE. An English Mathematician, Charles Babbage obtained government funding for his proposed steam driven calculating machine the size of a room called the Difference Engine. Babbage’s machine proved exceedingly difficult to construct and utterly expensive so when the funding dried up, the device was never finished.
However, Babbage was not deterred and was on to his next brainstorm which he called ANALYTIC ENGINE. This device was as large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines. It would be programmable making use of Jacquard’s punch card technology for its storage mechanism. The Analytic Engine has two main parts: the STORE where numbers were held and the MILL where these numbers are woven into new results. In the modern computer, these same parts are called the MEMORY UNIT and the CENTRAL PROCESSING UNIT.
The Analytic Engine remained unbuilt since the British government refused to get involved. Still, Babbage’s design of the Analytic Engine provided the basic framework of our modern day computers thereby naming CHARLES BABBAGE as the Father of Computers.
