Mechanical Devices
One of the earliest mechanical devices for calculating was the Pascaline, invented by the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642. The Pascaline was a complicated set of gears similar to a clock, and had the capability to add and subtract numbers. Later in the 17th century Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a famous mathematician, invented a device that could multiply, divide, calculate square roots, as well as addition and subtraction. He called it the Stepped Reckoner. In 1822, Charles Babbage began to work on the Difference Engine. This device would calculate numbers to the 20th place and then print then 44 digits per minute. The original purpose of this machine was to produce tables of numbers that would be used by ships’ navigators. Although never built, the design for the Difference Engine lead to the design of Babbage’s Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine, designed around 1833, was to perform a variety of calculations by the following set of instructions, or program, stored on punch cards. The engine was to store information in a memory unit that would allow it to make decisions and then carry out instructions. The Analytical Engine was also never built. . . .
Input Devices: devices from which the computer can accept data. The ASCII representation of the letters in the name JIM are: 74,73,77. The CPU consisted of different elements that did all the wire pulling, and re plugging. The ENIAC weighed 30 tons and occupied 1500 sqft. 15 Storage Devices Diskette: Also knows as a floppy disk. The first generation computers continued to use many vacuum tubes, which made them large and expensive. Real numbers, also called floating point numbers, are number that contains decimal points. The IBM system 360 was the first mainframes available. Binary representation of a real number is 4-8 bytes. Ada Byron is often called the first programmer because she wrote a program based on the design of the Analytical Engine. It can only follow instructions that it gets from the ROM or from a program in RAM. Also Ada was created another programming language named after the first programmer, Ada Byron.
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