(WT #2) History- An old history project of mine on the history of computers (Day 2)

Since I had to do a thread on history, I frantically searched the harddrive of this computer (it's my mom's computer, not mine) for old school projects/reports of mine that could count. This is the best I could come up with. It's a project for U.S. History class, which I took my junior year in high school. The project was to take a common household object and trace its history from invention to modern times. I chose the computer. My actual project had tons of snazzy pictures in it, but it'd be a ton of work to put them all in here, so this is the non-pic version. I hope this meets the requirement (if not, I didn't know, so we still get the points, right? Of course, right). Anyways...


The History of the Computer

A U.S. History Semester Project

By Julie M. R.

May 29, 2001


"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
--Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what ... is it good for?"
--Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
--Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
--Bill Gates, 1981


Before the year 2000 there was a big scare about what would happen to the world if all of the computers shut down because of the ?Y2K bug?. Why? Because computers are an incredibly integral part of our daily lives. They?re in our cars, ATM machines, microwaves, VCRs, and stereos. Some of us also have them on our desks. But in spite of their all-pervasiveness in our lives now, computers in any form at all have only been around for a relatively short time. They were developed by many different people in different times and places, whose ideas eventually came together to make the modern computer. There is no single obvious inventor of the computer, to which everything can easily be traced.

In 2000 BC or so, the abacus was invented. This could be considered the first computer in a way. It consisted of beads on a rack and was used to make simple computations. In 1622 William Oughtred developed the slide rule in England. This was able to do multiplication and division by being marked with a logarithmic scale. These two things could be considered to be the earliest computers.

In 1623 Wilhelm Schikard, a German scientist, invented a machine with sprocketed wheels that could add, and with logarithm tables multiply and divide. In 1642, Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, invented a numerical wheel calculator, also known as a Pascaline. This would calculate using a base of ten, moving the tens place one position when the ones place went up one position, etc. It did have the drawback that it could only add. A German mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz, improved on Pascal?s machine in 1694 by adding gears that would allow it to multiply also. After that, Leibniz continued to improve and refine the machine, though it was not until 1820 that mechanical calculators gained widespread use. Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar invented a machine that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and was called a arithometer. The arithometer was actually widely used until World War I. All these things were, in a way, steps toward the computer. But all of these merely performed simple computations and were not like what we really think of as computers in that they were not programmable.

One of the first truly programmable computers did not do computations at all, but was a kind of loom. It was invented in the early 1800s by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French inventor. This loom

 

Y2K? I remember that! It was a bit disappointing.

 

Yes. Though disappointing in a good way, as the world didn't end or anything.

I didn't even actually read that report before I posted it. I hope there aren't any major problems with it. What can I say, I volunteered to do the history thread cause no one else would do it, but I am not a history type person.

 

I suppose I was too late to beat you to the History thread Julie. I planned on coming back on late tonight to see if I needed to do anything. I am soooo sorry. I really am.

I'll make it up somehow... Well, try to at least.

~*Senoj*~

 

I remember seeing toasters with stickers on them saying "Y2K friendly".

 

I own one of those toasters, Kerryn!