|
|
|
|
To view the video, select a player and then click on your connection speed.
Dialup
High Speed
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Visit Visual Ranking and use the interactive thinking tool to arrange a list of inventions in order of significance. Compare your list with other students' results, and explore the ways in which technological inventions have shaped the world throughout human history. |
|
|
|
|
History of Computers
Throughout time, humans have invented ingenious calculating machines. One of the earliest was the abacus.
It's about 5,000 years old. Mechanical calculators that could add and multiply (but not subtract!) were invented in the 1600s. In 1820,
Charles Xavier Thomas de Colman invented the arithometer, a machine that could add, subtract, multiply and divide. It was Charles
Babbage though, in the early 1800s, who designed mechanical calculating machines (see photo) that were the true ancestor of today's
computers. Ada Byron King (Countess of Lovelace) was his programmer and today is considered the mother of computer
programming.
Babbage's design for his ultimate calculator, the Analytical Engine, was never produced. It did anticipate
the four components essential to modern computing. These components are input, storage, processing and output.
The problem with Babbage's and other mechanical calculators was just that—they were mechanical. The moving
parts they relied on were slow and subject to breakdown.
What made modern computers possible was the invention of something that could do calculations and other
information processing with no moving parts and do it very fast. That something was electronic components. With electronic components, a fast and efficient machine such as Babbage
proposed could be built with all four components essential to modern computing.
|
|