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The Computer's Humble Beginnings

Every one of us probably knows what a computer is and what it is capable of doing. It is practically one of the greatest inventions of all time. But who would have thought that this extremely popular machine started as a device, made usually of wood, with a frame that holds rods for columns of freely-sliding beads mounted on them?

Yes, the development of the modern day computer was of humble beginnings. It was the product of technological advances and breakthroughs and man's need to quantify.

It was 3,000 BC when the abacus was invented in Babylonia. Its purpose was simple; it was used as a counting device, and a very simple one at that. It can only be used for addition and subtraction and cannot handle more complicated calculations.

In 80 AD, the Antikythera Device was discovered inside the wreckage of a cargo ship on the Greek island of Antikythera. It was a mechanical, lunar month calculator made from bronze and designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was a one-of-a-kind mechanism which led the Greeks to construct other things based on it.

The development didn't stop there. In 1622, William Oughtred invented the slide rule base on the emerging works of John Napier on logarithms. Also known as "slipstick," it is a mechanical device used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as logarithms, roots, exponentials and trigonometry. It does not, however, generally perform addition or subtraction.

A year after Oughtred's invention, Wilhelm Schickard built the first known true mechanical calculator, called the "Calculating Clock". The name was misleading, as it did not actually tell time. This device was able to do all four fundamental operations and operated on 6 digit numbers. It sounded a bell to designate "overflow", meaning that the calculation was too large and could not be represented on its readouts.

Unfortunately, the calculating clock went missing when Schickard and his entire family died from the plague in the mid-1630s. The copy he was building for the astronomer Johannes Kepler was also lost when a fire destroyed the workshop where it was being designed. Even Schickard's own copy was lost.

Only in the 20th century was any info about the device recovered. A sketch by Schickard of the mechanism design was found among Kepler's notes at the Pulkovo Observatory near Leningrad, Russia during the 1950s and was used to build a working copy of the device by a German professor.

In 1642, Blaise Pascal invented an adding machine, which was named Pascaline. The Pascaline could also perform all four fundamental operations, making use of a series of toothed wheels, which were turned by hand and which could handle numbers up to 999,999.999. It was however, too expensive and white collar workers were afraid to work with it, fearing that they may accidentally dump it and thus, lose their jobs.

Many developments followed after that, including the mechanical calculator of Samuel Morland in 1666; in 1674 the "Stepped Reckoner" of Gottfried Leibnitz, one of the men responsible for calculus; the introduction of binary mathematics of Leibnitz in 1679; Phillip-Malthus Hahn manufactures and tries to sell a small amount of calculating machines, which boasted of being accurate up to 12 digits in 1774.

It was in 1822 however that a great breakthrough was started. Charles Babbage started the designs on the Difference Engine, which is an automatic and mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. As polynomials can approximate trigonometric, exponential and logarithmic functions, a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers.

After ten years, he finished a portion of his Difference Engine and continued to develop it into what was known as an Analytical Engine in 1834. The succeeding inventions were then based from Babbage's Analytical Engine and later, eventually evolved into the computer we know of today.

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