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.
Tape Drive: Another form of storage devise that use media with a much greater capacity. The IBM system 360 was the first mainframes available. . The range of integers that can be stored is -32,768 to 32767. The first generation computers continued to use many vacuum tubes, which made them large and expensive. Herman Hollerith invented a tabulating machine that used electricity rather then mechanical gears. In this code each letter of the alphabet, both uppercase and lowercase, and each symbol, digit and special control function used by computer is assigned a number. Census had trouble tabulating their information. Data stored in memory is referred to by an address. Each hole represented a specific peace of information. (Expensive, but capable of handling massive paperwork produced by government agencies). For clarity, a non-base 10 number should have the base subscription after the number. 101 represents the sum 1x2² the 0 represents 0x2¹ and the 1 represents 1x2º.
Common topics in this essay:
Generation Computers,
Logic Unit,
Data Memory,
Memory Address,
Analytical Engine,
Herman Hollerith,
Output Devices,
ABC ENIAC,
Computer ABC,
Output CPU,
generation computers,
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ada byron,
hard disk,
data stored,
stored program,
inside base unit,
hard drive,
represents power,
disk drive,
magnetic tape,
cpu central processing,
ibm system 360,
drive disk drive,
central processing unit,
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