This blog about Computer History

Friday, December 31, 2010

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Micral N

December 29, 2010
  In France, the company R2E (Renationalisation et Etudes Electronics) formed by two former engineers of the Intertechnique company, And...

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Monday, December 20, 2010

December 20, 2010
At the other end of the computing spectrum from the microcomputers, the powerful supercomputers of the era also used integrated circuit tech...

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Friday, December 3, 2010

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Monday, November 22, 2010

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Friday, November 5, 2010

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Monday, October 25, 2010

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

May 19, 2010
One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper. Hopper found the first computer "bug": a dead moth that h...

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

May 18, 2010
Here's a close-up of one of the Mark I's four paper tape readers. A paper tape was an improvement over a box of punched cards as any...

Saturday, May 15, 2010

May 15, 2010
You can see the 50 ft rotating shaft in the bottom of the prior photo. This shaft was a central power source for the entire machine. This de...

Friday, May 14, 2010

May 14, 2010
IBM continued to develop mechanical calculators for sale to businesses to help with financial accounting and inventory accounting. One chara...

Thursday, May 13, 2010

May 13, 2010
Two types of computer punch cards Incidentally, the Hollerith census machine was the first machine to ever be featured on a magazine cover.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

May 12, 2010
The patterns on Jacquard's cards were determined when a tapestry was designed and then were not changed. Today, we would call this a re...

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

May 11, 2010
Babbage was not deterred, and by then was on to his next brainstorm, which he called the Analytic Engine . This device, large as a house an...

Monday, May 10, 2010

May 10, 2010
Jacquard's technology was a real boon to mill owners, but put many loom operators out of work. Angry mobs smashed Jacquard looms and on...

Sunday, May 9, 2010

May 09, 2010
In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a patt...

Saturday, May 8, 2010

May 08, 2010
Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (...

Friday, May 7, 2010

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

May 05, 2010
Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule , first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engine...
May 05, 2010
In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be ...

The abacus

May 05, 2010
The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids the memory of the human performing the calculation...
May 05, 2010
The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers) were given this name because they perf...