BITS OF HISTORY

Humans have always tried to make the basic operations of writing and counting easier. The first successful counting device was the Chinese abacus, which is very fast in the hands of an experienced operator. After the Renaissance in Europe, individuals concentrated on building machines that could perform arithmetic operations. In 1614, John Napier of Scotland invented logarithms and the slide rule. In 1643, Blaise Pascal of France created a machine that could add and subtract. In 1673, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz of Germany developed a calculator that could multiply.

The first attempt at anything that approaches our definition of a computer occurred in 1820 when Englishman Charles Babbage built a machine to make arithmetic computations. His Difference Engine was a special-purpose device for calculating the values of polynomials of the form x² + 3x + 20 to an accuracy of six places. After this success, Babbage tried to develop a more sophisticated device—the Analytical Engine— which would be able to perform any type of arithmetic calculation. The crucial conceptual breakthrough in the Analytical Engine was that it would store the series of operations to be made. Babbage was aided by Lady Ada Lovelace, the daughter of English poet Lord Byron. Lovelace clearly described Babbage's ideas in written form, supplementing notes on his work with ideas of her own. Unfortunately, the technology of the time was not advanced enough for Babbage to build his machine, which used gears and wheels to carry out the necessary logic. A model that was built later from his plans worked as Babbage claimed it would.

Many of the ideas of Babbage and Lovelace were very advanced. In fact, if the technology had been available to build Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1840, the computer might have been developed 100 years earlier than it was. As an example of their farsighted ideas, consider this quote from Lady Lovelace. Her words may also be applied to modern computers:

The Analytical Engine has no pretension whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no way of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.

For her tireless effort on this "grandfather" of the modem computer, Lady Lovelace has been honored by having a computer language named after her; the language is Ada

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Date: 2015-02-03; view: 755