• 1642 Mechanical Adder
  • Blaise Pascal, Used gears, could add and subtract
• 1670's - Mechanical Calculator
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Could add, subtract, multiply and divide
• 1801 - Jaquard's Loom
  • Joseph-Marie Jacquard metal punched cards, First "stored program" program device
• 1822 - Difference Engine
  • Charles Babbage. Designed to compute polynomials. Used a stored program. Abandoned in 1833.

    

    Charles Babage's (1791-1871) Difference Engine

• 183? Analytic Engine
  • Charles Babbage. General purpose algebraic calculator. Used punched card program. Had a "store" to hold Intermediate results and data. Supported by Ada Augusta, the Countace of Lovelace.

    

    Augusta Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace, the first computer programmer

• 1890 - Census Tabulator
  • Herman Hollerith invented modern punched card for use in machine to help tabulate census. Formed tabulating company that became IBM in 1924.
• 1942 - First Electronic computer
  • John Atanasoft at Iowa State University
• 1944 Mark I
  • Howard Aiken (supported by IBM). Electromechanical computer. First realization of Babbage's Analytic Engine.
• 1946 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)
  • J.P. Eckert and J.W. Mauchly at U. of Penn. Used18000 vacuum tubes. Programmed by rewiring circuits. 1000 x faster than Mark I

ENIAC, a general purpose computer, designed and built by Eckert and Mauchly and
completed in 1946.

• 1951 - UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) Eckert & Mauchly First commercially available general purpose computer

See IEEE pages for more historical information

Computer Generations

• First - used vacuum tubes - UNIVAC
• second - used transistors - IBM 7090
• third - used integrated circuits - silicon
• fourth - used VLSI
• next generation - biological? neural based ?? quantum??

History of the Programming Languages