The Ancient History of Computers by Richard Axtell Let's go back in time about two thousand years to the time when the first computing device was invented. Do you know what this device was called? The answer is the ABACUS. This device is still in use to this day in Japan and China. These use equally spaced wires or rods with beads to represent digits. Now we move forward in time and meet the man who invited the first adding/subtracting device. His name was Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). At the age of 19, he constructed this device and gave Louis XIV, King of France, a copy. This device used gears, rods and dials for computing answers to problems. Most people introduced to this device refused to use it because they feared it would eliminate the need for human calculators someday (sound familiar?) The first commercially used adding machines appeared nearly 200 years later, in about 1820. In 1822 Charles Babbage (1792-1871), a British mathematician, designed and built a prototype of the difference machine. This machine was to generate mathematical tables and could perform repetitive calculations to make these tables. In 1833 Babbage redesigned the machine radically, calling his new design the analytical engine. Babbage never built this machine, but the design used a steam engine and cogged cylinders to perform calculations. The engine would use punched cards for inputting data and instructions. The Countess of Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter), who was a mathematician, called Babbage's analytical engine a machine that would weave algebraic patterns just as a Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. The countess was considered the first to write computer programming for this machine. In 1890, Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) developed the first electric machine that could read punched cards. At this time he worked for the U.S. Census Bureau and his device was used to help with census information. The machine was used in other countries, like Canada and Russia, for the same purpose. Hollerith formed a company in 1896 called Tabulating Machine Company. This company was one of the companies that later joined to form the company familiar to us all as IBM in 1924. In 1928 astronomers Wallace J. Eckert from the U.S. and John Cromie of England devised punch card machines for calculating astronomical and nautical tables. Moving to 1943, J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly and associates designed a machine called Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). The machine was built in 1944. It used 18,000 vacuum tubes and 180,000 watts of electricity. It also required space equal to a two bedroom house. This machine could calculate in 20 seconds ballistic problems that would take one person 20 hours using a desk calculator. ENIAC was also used for calculations to develop the first atomic bomb. Also in 1944, the Harvard Mark I was finished. This electro-mechanical device could perform the calculations planned for the analytical engine by Babbage some 111 years before. The Mark I was designed by Howard Aiken and Associates. This machine was 8 feet tall by 55 feet long and had around 750,000 parts. The Mark I could handle numbers with 23 digits and do all arithmetic operations along with logarithms and trigonometric functions. By 1945, John von Neumann proposed the idea of stored memory and designed his EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). The design was completed in 1952. Von Neumann is considered the father of the modern electronic computer. Construction of UNIVAC was ordered in 1947 for use by the U.S. Census Bureau. Eckert and Mauchly completed the work in 1951. This and other computers similar in design to UNIVAC used delay-line memory and performed multiplication by repetitive addition. The decade of the 50's was a time of great change for computers. The use of ferrite core memory began and the transistor was to replace the vacuum tube. Technological development was not the only thing to take leaps in the 50's. The idea of assembly language to translate the binary codes used by computers to more easily understood instructions was introduced in that decade. Some of the higher-level languages that more closely resemble terminology, such as COBOL, ALGOL and FORTRAN, were developed in the 50's and early 60's. The early 60's focused on building larger memories and more functions into computers. Photo printing of circuits to make computers smaller and faster was started in the early 60's. The LARC computer from Sperry-Rand Corp, and Sterch, built by IBM, were two of the new computers of the early 60's. Business started using computers at that time also. In 1963, The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City became the first newspaper to use computers to set all classified and editorial text. One year later American Airlines and IBM joined forces to build the first airlines reservation system, called SABRE. The APOLLO lunar project is another example of use of computers in science and engineering. Without the computer it would not have been possible to land men on the moon. This brings us to the decade of the 1970's which was when size and cost of computers took a leap forward and backward too. Hand held calculators became an item in the 70's. Their prices and size began to decrease and their popularity began to grow in leaps and bounds. This was the decade of the super computer, where we saw huge computers that affected our lives in ways that are still all around us today. Super computers were used for forecasting weather, astrophysics, nuclear engineering and oceanographic research. Onward to the good old 80's and we see home computers that for a short time had sky high price tags come down in price so much they would give them to you. Texas Instruments closed out the TI-99 computers at $50 and they would give you a rebate of $50 when you bought them. Now hand-held calculators are hand-held computers and desk-top computers are becoming laptop computers. In the 60's they set text for newspapers with computers. Now we print pictures generated with computers. The 180,000 tubes of a few years ago have been replaced by silicon chips with a million transistors in the space of a quarter inch by quarter inch square as thin as a piece of paper. In the next decade we will see computers like the one dreamed up called TABLET that will read your handwriting and convert it to text--as well as a few other nice things our fathers didn't even dream of. Will it be a 19-year old person who brings us into a new era of these machines which started out using gears, rods and dials? Don't wait too long to answer that question--it may happen before you finish reading this sentence! (from Greater Oklahoma Commodore Club Newsletter, 10/88; reprinted from an earlier issue of The Interface, via the Commodore Information Center, http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html)