Why invented computer

Computing Inventions Technology. Ventana al Conocimiento Knowledge Window. Estimated reading time Time 6 to read. Charles Babbage and the mechanical computer Before Babbage, computers were humans. Credit: Science Museum Far from being discouraged by this setback, mathematician, philosopher, engineer and inventor Charles Babbage doubled down.

The Thomson brothers and analogue computers In , one year after Charles Babbage died, the great physicist William Thomson Lord Kelvin invented a machine capable of performing complex calculations and predicting the tides in a given place.

Credit: Science Museum However, it took several more decades until, well into the 20th century, H. Turing and the universal computing machine By this point, these analogue machines could already replace human computers in some tasks and were calculating faster and faster, especially when their gears began to be replaced by electronic components.

Zuse and the digital computer Although Turing established what a computer should look like in theory, he was not the first to put it into practice. Credit: Deutsches Museum The first computer that was Turing-complete, and that had those four basic features of our current computers was the ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer , secretly developed by the US army and first put to work at the University of Pennsylvania on 10 December in order to study the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.

Part 1. Do you want to stay up to date with our new publications? Receive the OpenMind newsletter with all the latest contents published on our website Find out more here. Comments on this publication Login to comment Log in Subscribe. Thank you for collaborating with the OpenMind community! Your comment will be published after validation. Please, try again later. Next article. We know that the designs were feasible since a few machines based on Babbage's ideas were actually built and operated during the 19th century.

A plausible argument can be made that the British Government's investment was more than repaid by the Babbage project's role as a nursery for British precision engineering. One of the reasons for the failure to build a machine was its replacement in Babbage's mind by the grander project of a universal machine able to carry out any mathematical calculation. We know that Babbage's final plans were logically sound and that he did indeed design the mechanical equivalent of today's electronic computer.

Could his universal "Analytical Engine" have been built and operated? Opinions differ. Many fortunes were lost before typesetting could be reliably mechanised. Even if a "demonstration model" of a Babbage machine could have been constructed most people agree that it could the nature of the technology meant that scaling up to bigger machines would have involved new difficulties.

In my view, one of the chief obstacles to the realisation of the Analytical Engine was the failure to imagine tasks grand enough for the grand machine. I am not aware of any proposal to use the machine for purposes where human labour could not do the job reasonably well. One task where humans seemed inadequate was processing the results of the US census.

It took seven years to tabulate the results of the census and something new was obviously needed for the census.

The something new was provided by Hollerith who used a system based on punched cards. Once the data had been entered onto the cards, sorting and counting was done mechanically.

This time, processing took only two years and produced a superior product. Over the next fifty years, the use of such "punched card" machines grew steadily as did their capabilities and the uses to which they were put. The years from to also saw the invention and use of a number of "analogue computing machines". Roughly speaking, these machines modeled a physical system by mechanical or electrical means. One of earliest was the very successful Kelvin tide predictor in which a complex arrangement of wheels and pulleys drew a graph showing the sea level to be expected at a given port at a given time.

One of the last and apparently most spectacular was an immense agglomeration of glass tubes, plumbing and coloured water which was intended to model the British economy. Many of these analogue machines were both ingenious and useful but from our point of view they were merely special purpose devices. As with many innovative ideas, Babbage recognized the limitations of his machine, and in the absence of funding, the difference engine unfortunately never came to full fruition.

Still, by , Babbage had already begun thinking about how to improve his design and the functionality of the machine. If you remember, Ada is recognized as one, if not the first computer programmer. She was the daughter of Lord Byron, whom many English majors may recognize as an influential figure in the world of poetry. The two quickly became friends after meeting in It is in these basic ideas that the plans for the Analytical Engine became the foundation for what we understand as part of computer processing and programming today.

A simple example is the keyboard and monitor combination. It was an idea he actually borrowed from the Jacquard loom, another invention of the 19 th century, which wove patterns in fabric using similar punched cards.

Prior to this, machines could only accomplish a singular task Korner, Babbage devised a plan for this simple punched card reader for programming data input. Not only could the analytical engine theoretically perform these basic functions, it would also be able to repeat a set of instructions based on certain conditions.

Ada Byron, now Countess of Lovelace after marrying William King, the earl of Lovelace, continued her own work in the fields of math and science. She took this somewhat groundbreaking insight and went on to create a program for computing Bernoulli numbers, numbers often used in navigation. She succeeded in doing so, with a minor mathematical flaw here and there. Computers, love them or hate them, we rely on them every day.

But, have you ever stopped to think about who invented computers and how they came to dominate our lives? So who invented the first computer and who can I blame for all those wasted hours? You might be surprised to learn that many computer pioneers struggled to get funding for their ideas and faced skepticism from their contemporaries. Early computers were actually people, not machines — it was a job title. The word dates back to It is an ancient-Geek, hand-powered mechanical device.

Archeologists believe it was used to calculate eclipses and other astronomical events. Due to its complexity, many speculate that it had several, less complex predecessors.

Generally, these fulfilled a single purpose. From until his death in , he designed 3 computers , but never actually constructed any of them, due to lack of funding.

In Babbage started working on a Difference Engine its purpose was to compute polynomial functions. If completed it would have had some 25, parts, weighed 13, kg 15 short tons and been 2. Between — Babbage created drawings for the Difference Engine No.

Amazingly, it worked! It took 6 years to build, weighs The Analytical Engine , a later Babbage computer design, would have had a whopping bytes of memory! Punch cards were used as input, based on the Jacquard Loom punch card system , invented at the turn of the 19th century. He saw mechanical computers as a way to remove error. As we all know, necessity is the mother of invention and never was that more true that during WW2! During this period, electromechanical computer technology speed rocketed.

Early electromechanical computers were a sort of hybrid between modern electrical computers and analog computers. Electric switches drove mechanical relays, although parts still wore out quickly, electrical switches could open and close around 1, times faster than mechanical ones, making electromechanical computers much, much faster.