History of Early Computing
A potted history of early computing devices
Last updated
Jun 03, 2024
Cards
08
Dates
08
Links
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Density
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Timelines published by our users.
A potted history of early computing devices
Last updated
Jun 03, 2024
Cards
08
Dates
08
Links
00
Density
0
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[Created]
The Z3 was a German electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was built with 2,600 relays, implementing a 22-bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz. Program code was stored on punched film. Initial values were entered manually.
[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.
[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.