Computers had been incredibly expensive because they required so much hand assembly, such as the wiring seen in this CDC 7600:
dad
May 28, 2010
Typical wiring in an early mainframe computer [photo courtesy The Computer Museum]
Friday, May 28, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
To be bested by a home computer of 1976 such as this Apple I which sold for only $600:
dad
May 25, 2010
The Apple 1 which was sold as a do-it-yourself kit (without the lovely case seen here)
Saturday, May 22, 2010
The first computer bug
dad
May 22, 2010
In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic". This language eventually became COBOL which was the lan...
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
dad
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
dad
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
dad
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
dad
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
dad
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
dad
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
dad
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
dad
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
dad
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
dad
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
Schickard's Calculating Clock
dad
May 07, 2010
In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-dr...
A Leonardo da Vinci drawing showing gears arranged for computing
dad
May 07, 2010
The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the calculating clock , so named by its inventor, the German pro...
Thursday, May 6, 2010
A slide rule
dad
May 06, 2010
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made drawings of gear-driven calculating machines but apparently never built any.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
dad
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...
dad
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
dad
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...
dad
May 05, 2010
The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers) were given this name because they perf...
