How the Computer Began

Please mention The Villager and Town Life when responding to adverts 4 Believe it or not, the seeds for the earliest computers were sown at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1801 French weaver Joseph Jacquard invented a loom that used punched wooden cards to automatically produce fabric designs – a concept that featured in the first computer systems. However, it is Charles Babbage who is usually credited with the invention of the computer. Born in 1791, he conceived a steam-driven programmable engine able to work out mathematical problems. Sadly, Babbage never lived to see his computer built, but amongst his many drawings and plans he left behind such a detailed technical design for ‘Difference Engine No. 2’ that the Science Museum’s curator decided to undertake the project in the 1980s. Finished in 2002, it works accurately, produces printouts and weighs five tons. Babbage’s computer was never used in anger. However, during the late 1880s, population growth in the United States meant that the government was struggling to calculate its census figures, so in 1890 Herman Hollerith designed a punch card system to automate the task. He saved the government $5 million and in the process Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No 1.

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established the company that went on to become IBM. Alan Turing is often described as the father of modern computers. In 1936 he invented the concept of the ‘Turing Machine’ that was capable of universal calculation, a computer description now referred to as ‘Turing complete’. Theoretically, the machine had limitless memory, could read data, write results, and store a program of instructions just like a modern computer. Although it was never built, Turing’s subsequent contribution to cracking the Enigma Code during World War II is well-documented. Turing also foresaw the use of artificial intelligence (AI), devising a test he called the ‘Imitation Game’ to measure computer intelligence. In 1941 German engineer Konrad Zuse attempted to actualise the ‘Turing complete’ concept with the first binary programmable electro-mechanical computer – the Z1 – which read instructions from 35mm punched film. Between 1943 and 1944, two American professors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, constructed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, known as ENIAC. Considered to be the first electronic computer, it was 1,000 times faster than its predecessors, measured 800 square feet and had 18,000 vacuum tubes. From this came UNIVAC, the first commercial computer which was launched in 1946. COBOL was the first computer language, invented by Grace Hopper in 1953. This was closely followed by FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), developed by a team of programmers at IBM. Coupled with this, in 1958 Nobel prize-winner Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce manufactured the first computer chip: an integrated electronic circuit. Towards the end of the 1960s, design engineers at Bell Labs came up with a computer operating system known as UNIX. Written in a programming language they called C, UNIX was useable across multiple platforms. It subsequently became the standard for mainframe computers. Up until then, computers had not been suitable for use in homes, but in 1964 Douglas Engelbart produced a single user-friendly prototype including the now ubiquitous mouse and a graphical user interface. The famous floppy disk was invented by Alan Shugart of IBM in 1971. For the first time, it easily enabled software to be plugged in and shared between

computers. As a result, personal computers (PCs) started to become available and Computer Science became the official subject for ‘geeks’ in the school curriculum. 1975 saw the foundation of Microsoft by two such self-confessed geeks: Paul Allen and Bill Gates. Two years later the two Steves – Jobs and Wozniak – founded Apple Computers. Surprisingly, the first IBM PC wasn’t launched until 1981. It used MS-DOS and included an Intel chip, two floppy disk drives and the option of a colour monitor. Meanwhile, Apple was busy developing its longstanding rival, the Mackintosh. The 1980s saw further leaps in computer development. Computer software programs for both home and business use exploded. Word processing revolutionised the typing pool with programs like Wordstar, later replaced by Word. It was also the era that Microsoft launched their groundbreaking Windows operating system and the first one hundred dot coms were registered for the newly created ‘worldwide web’ after physicist Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML (HyperText Markup Language) on which it was based. In the last twenty years, computer technology has smashed through the glass ceiling with its evermore fast-paced development, from computers that once filled a whole room to those we now carry in our pockets. Even the relatively new Internet has seen huge changes with dial-up modems being replaced by Wi-Fi, and connectivity speeds increasing thanks to broadband (well, for a lot of areas at least). Computer games no longer require an old-fashioned floppy disk, or even a DVD, as everything increasingly moves into virtual reality. Could Charles Babbage have foreseen the difference his Difference Machine would make when he was giving demonstrations to his academic friends in London all those years ago? I wonder…

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