The History of Computing: A Very Short Introduction

Title	Author	Publication date	Resource type
The History of Computing: A Very Short Introduction	Doron Swade	2022	Book

Timeline

A typical timeline approach rooted in major innovations.

Ancient aids to counting: knotted cords and notched sticks
Ancient aids to calculation: counting boards and abacii
Early mechanical calculator devices in the 17th century (number wheels, Pascal, Leibniz)
Modern aids to calculation: slide rules following the discovery of logarithms
Mechanised, automated calculating engines of Babbage in the 19th century
Punched-card machines leading to IBM in the early 20th century
Analogue and electro-mechanical computers of the early 20th century inclusive of wartime computers
Early valve-based (vacuum-tubed) digital computers (again wartime and early Cold War)
The invention of the transistor and first fully-digital computers
The invention of integrated_circuits
Supercomputers
Minicomputers
Consumer personal computers
Internet and later, Web
Smart phones

Mechanical calculating devices in the 17th century

Focus was chiefly on creating a desktop calculator capable of four-function arithmetic.

The main contenders were Pascal's Pascaline (which only did cumulative addition) and Leibniz's wheel or "stepped drum" calculator that could do all operations (in theory).

Subsequent designs were based on these artefacts. In practice, neither worked consistently well with the carriage of tens remaining a sticking point.

The arithmometer (crank driven) and comptometer (key-driven) were descendents of the Leibniz design that became commercially viable by the 19th century along with other mechanical calculators. In the US, Burroughs dominated the market.

Babbage: mechanized, automated calculation

I wish to God these calculations had been executed by Steam (Babbage)

With Babbage's machines we see an approach to computation that can only be understood against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution in which they were conceived.

The idea is that the machine is a factory and number is the product. In the same way as the mechanised looms created textiles. It is the extension of a model of industrial production from goods/commodities to information.

Babbage conceived two machines: the Difference Engine (DE) and the Analytical Engine (AE). Neither were successfully built in his lifetime. The DE preceded the AE and was basically an advanced mechanical calculator whereas the AE approximated a general purpose computer.

Difference Engine

The DE's single purpose was to calculate and output mathematical tables such as the results of polynomial equations. The idea was that you would input the variables of the equation and activate the machine and it would output the results. Associated with this concept was the idea that once it arrived at the answer a bell would ring and the machine would halt. This influenced Turing later. It was non-programmable and designed for a specific set of calculations.

Analytical Engine

Conceived as a general-purpose computing machine capable of perfoming a wide range of calculations, programmable using punched cards similar to those used with Jacquard looms.

It more resembled modern computers in that Babbage used concepts that would later translate into the von Neumann architecture. There was a "mill" (CPU), "store" (memory) and input/output mechanisms. It also had a concept of looping and conditional branching.

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