Image: Holly Lindem (photoillustration); Gene Burkhardt (styling)
In Brief
- The first “computers” were people—individuals and teams who would tediously compute sums by hand to fill in artillery tables.
- Inspired by the work of a computing team in revolutionary France, Charles Babbage, a British mathematician, created the first mechanical device that could organize calculations.
- The first modern computers arrived in the 1950s, as researchers created machines that could use the result of their calculations to alter their operating instructions.
More In This Article
In the standard story, the computer’s evolution has been brisk and short. It starts with the giant machines warehoused in World War II–era laboratories. Microchips shrink them onto desktops, Moore’s Law predicts how powerful they will become, and Microsoft capitalizes on the software. Eventually small, inexpensive devices appear that can trade stocks and beam video around the world. That is one way to approach the history of computing—the history of solid-state electronics in the past 60 years.
But computing existed long before the transistor. Ancient astronomers developed ways to predict the motion of the heavenly bodies. The Greeks deduced the shape and size of Earth. Taxes were summed; distances mapped. Always, though, computing was a human pursuit. It was arithmetic, a skill like reading or writing that helped a person make sense of the world.
This article was originally published with the title Origin of Computing.
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15 Comments
Add Comment9 out of 10 images that show gears show gears that do not mesh.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this9 out of 10 statistics are made up on the spot.
Noting the theme of this issue and efforts to bring favorable credit to the truly deserving innovators passed over in history, it was a real shock to see Mauchly & Eckert awarded the "spark of genius," and without any mention of J. V. Atanasoff, whom I first learned of in Sci Am August 1988, and never forgot. We all have calculators, PCs, and smartphones today because Mauchly's patent claim was proven false, having stolen every essential concept of the ENIAC design from Atanasoff and Berry at U of Iowa.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpeaking origin of computing, We have to say it's no other than Chinese SuanPan. It has come into being for more than 2000 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt has both structure of hardware and software. Every wonderful. we still use it even in this electronic computer ages.
Considering String Theory invalidates our perception of reality, we are going to have to reconsider the value of computing with anything other than our brains.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was disappointed in this article, as it ignores the contribution of Dr. Atanasoff of Iowa State University, the inventor of the electronic computer. Atanasoff built his ABC computer (Atanasoff-Berry computer).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a student at Iowa State I had to opportunity to listen to Dr. Atanasoff recount the development of his computer - how he realized that the base two number system greatly simplified the problem in a bar in Illinois. How his mother giving him a book on number bases as a child made him aware of the possibility of using a base other than 10.
Ultimately, the dates are important. The ABC computer was built and running in 1939, Mauchly built the INIAC in 1946.
In fact, Atanasoff told of the many meetings between Mauchly and himself in the early 1940's as they discussed details of the INIAC.
This being said, Atanasoff also acknowledged that Mauchly made many very positive improvements on the original Atanasoff computer.
Quite right. I met John Atanasoff in 1972, before his claim was acknowledged. When he told me that he invented the electronic digital computer I remember thinking, "Yeah, right!". Luckily I said nothing and listened. I heard the whole story from him, first hand. A fascinating story, a fascinating man. I think that in those days, I was one of the few that listened to him and we became friends. That was the time he was trying to deal with his wife's illness and he needed a few friends. I count myself quite lucky to have known him.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Ultimate Misdirection
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn page 69 of the September 2009 issue, the caption under the picture of young Paul Allen and Bill Gates said & a Teletype terminal attached by a phone line to a mainframe computer that filled a room . That continuing myth has probably done more to mislead the development of computer technology than has any other factor. In fact, their Teletype was connected to a Remote Time-Sharing Corp. HP-2116B minicomputer in an office on the 4th floor of Seattles Smith Tower. That minicomputer simultaneously served Lakeside School, several other Seattle-area high schools, and a number of commercial clients, all with only 64kB of main memory and an 11mB hard disk. In short, that minicomputer had approximately the computing power of a later Commodore 64.
However, that system was created with some of the most advanced computer technology ever to see commercial service. Some of the technology, like the first use of the ON ERROR statement, has since seen wide adoption. Some abilities like filtering data from databases through user code are now widespread in SQL, though the implementation is quite different. Some innovations have never been successfully duplicated elsewhere, like the multilingual (FORTRAN/ALGOL/BASIC) compiler, a full commercial implementation of significance arithmetic, and crash-free operation throughout its commercial operating life.
How were such mainframe-like miracles accomplished on so little hardware? There were a number of secrets that were borrowed from other earlier developments, including:
1. Most of the small amount of machine code was in interpreters executing Huffman-coded instructions. Most of the system code was written in these interpretive formats, where it was nearly impossible to accidentally crash the system, and the code was concise enough to fit into the tiny memory. This allowed for complex code, like the compilers, to remain memory-resident, thereby outperforming mainframe computers that had to page their compilers in pieces as needed. This technique was borrowed from the earlier Bell Labs Interpretive System for the IBM-650 computer.
2. The compiler was written in BNF with extensions for binary output. The BNF compiler compiled itself, thereby providing for considerable optimization for space through heuristics written in easily readable BNF. An appendix in the manual contained an accurate BNF description of the language, created by simply removing the output code from the compiler. These methods were borrowed from MITs earlier META-4 ALGOL compiler project.
In Origin of Computing, p.62 of the Sept. issue, Martin Campbell-Kelly wrote that "In 1790, shortly after the start of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte decided that the republic required a new set of maps to establish a fair system of property taxation. He also ordered a switch from the old imperial system of measurements to the new metric system."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is not quite true. In 1790 Bonaparte, then 21, was still a junior officer; France was still a monarchy; the metric system was devised a few years later during the Revolution and N.B. had nothing to do with it; there was no "imperial system" in France but miscellaneous ones in various provinces; when established, a few years before N.B.'s 1799 coup, the metric system was resented by the populace -- so much so that Napoleon, by then emperor halted it in 1812. It was restored and made mandatory in 1840 by King Louis-Philippe. Mr. Campbell-Kelly's article is otherwise fascinating.
In Dec 1943, Tommy Flowers and his team from what became British Telecom demonstrated a working programmable electronic computer, Colossus Mark I. Colossus was operational at secret code-breaking site Bletchley Park (where Alan Turing worked during WWII) by Feb 1944 and providing vital intel to allied forces that, accroding the Chutchill himself, probably ended the war two years early and saved 22 million lives - including American lives.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat Colossus, Bletchley Park or Alan Turing are not mentioned anywhere in an article on the origins of computing seems to be a startling oversight for such an esteemed publication like SciAm. I am very disappointed indeed.
Oops! That should read "according to Churchill himself". My bad :-)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat about the abacus? I recall no mention of it in the article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn reading computing in the September issue by Martin Campbell Kelly, I was surprised that the abacus was not mentioned. This device certainly should have it's place in computing devices since it dates back to Biblical times.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWeston H. Ament
Mokelumne Hill CA
I was surprised that the article Origin Of Computing By Martin Campbell Kelly in the September issue did not mention the abacus. Certainly it has a place in computing devices since it dates back to biblical times.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWeston Ament
Mokelumne Hill CA
This article misses the first pioneering computer programmers. Charles Babbages machine was programmed by Ada Lovelace. In fact Lovelace encoded an algorithm before Babbage finished building the machine. J. Prespert Eckert and John W. Mauchly are credited with inventing the ENIAC, but the people who invented a way to program it were Kathleen Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marilyn Meltzer, Francis Spense, and Ruth Teitelbaum. I was especially surprised that Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was not included in the article. Modern programming was established by Hopper when she conceptualized and led the development of COBOL, the first modern programming language. Hopper insisted that the modern programming language should be English like. She also coined the term debug was when she found the cause of an error that was actually a moth stuck in the machine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article misses the first pioneering computer programmers. Charles Babbage’s machine was programmed by Ada Lovelace. In fact Lovelace encoded an algorithm before Babbage finished building the machine. J. Prespert Eckert and John W. Mauchly are credited with inventing the ENIAC, but the people who invented a way to program it were Kathleen Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marilyn Meltzer, Francis Spense, and Ruth Teitelbaum. I was especially surprised that Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was not included in the article. Modern programming was established by Hopper when she conceptualized and led the development of COBOL, the first modern programming language. Hopper insisted that the modern programming language should be English like. She also coined the term debug was when she found the cause of an error that was actually a moth stuck in the machine.
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