History of Early Computing
A potted history of early computing devices
- First Published
- Tue Oct 04 2022
- Last Published
- Thu Jan 26 2023
- Number of cards
- 7
- Number of dates
- 7
- Number of links
- 0
- Link density
- 0
DEFAULT
1801
Jacquard Loom
[Created]
French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard developed a loom in which the pattern being woven was controlled by a paper tape constructed from punched cards. The paper tape could be changed without changing the mechanical design of the loom.
1822
Difference Engine
[Created]
Charles Babbage designed this automatic mechanical calculator to tabulate polynomial functions. He built a 1/7th model, but he never finished the complete machine.
1842
Ada Lovelace
[Programs]
An English mathematician and writer (and daughter of poet Lord Byron), Ada Lovelace translated a text on Babbage's Analyical Engine, adding many notes, including an app for calculating Bernoulli numbers.
1890
The Hollerith Electric Tabulating System
[Commercial use]
Herman Hollerith invented data storage on punched cards that could then be read by a machine. His machines used electromechanical relays and counters and was used in many census programs around the world. Hollerith's company eventually became the core of IBM.
1936
Turing Machine
[Invented]
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules.
1947
Field-effect transistor
[Invented]
The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented by physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.
1960
Monolithic integrated circuits
[Created]
The first planar, monolithic integrated circuits were developed by Fairchild Semiconductor based on the work of Lehovec, Hoerni, Kilby and Noyce, and tested on this date. NASA's Apollo Program was the largest single consumer of integrated circuits for the next 5 years.