ComputerHistory

The history of the computer

an interactive journey

Word Cloud

In what ways have computers already affected your life TODAY?

Multiple Select

What things were highlighted in this clip as being handled or directed by computers? (select multiple)

• the power grid

• water treatment plants

• livestock feeding

• cars crashing

​Carrie Ann of Crash Course Computer History said:

“With billions of transistors in just your smart phones, computers can seem pretty complicated, but really they are just simple machines that perform complex actions through many layers of abstraction."

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What is meant by the term abstraction in this quote?

Huh?

Think of a computer like a specialized LEGO set. It's made up of lots of tiny pieces that work together to create something amazing. Even though it looks complicated, it's just a bunch of simple parts doing simple jobs that build on each other.

when Mesopotamian
society got too big to easily
track

​invented around 2500BCE

the beginning- an abacus

​these make values 1 and 2, with the 1 in the tens place

Open Ended

How does the fourth column represent 6? how does the 3 column show 9?

Mechanical Calculators

Pascal's calculator 1642

Leibniz's Step Reckoner in 1694

What was the job title of these incredible people?

​

Significant Figures

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How are the Step Reckoner, Pascal's Calculator, and the people who worked as calculators similar?

Range tables

Precomputed Tables

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Range tables needed frequent updates

Every change to artillery required new values to be determined.

so it was until...
Modern Computing was born in the
1830's

English mathematician wrote hypothetical programs for the Analytical Engine

​

​Ada Lovelace

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What's wrong with the picture that AI gave me?

the 1880 census took 7 years to tabulate

​

Taking a Census

Word Cloud

What was the problem with that?

included electrical components to speed up counting and tabulating

10 times faster than manual methods

became part of IBM

​

​Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine

Included 765,000 components
3 million connections
500 miles of wire
with a rate of 3 additions/ subtractions per second

​

​Harvard Mark I
1944

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What was happening around 1945 that motivator work towards electronic computing?

coded messages were transmitted through Morse code

​

The German Enigma

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Alan Turing, the father of computer science, and others were working on a code breaking machine

​

in England

• built in 1945, at the University of Pennsylvania

• first successful general-purpose electronic computer

• weighed 30 tons

• in its 10 years it did more math than the entire human race up to that point

​The ENIAC

Grace Hopper

​

​Computer bug

​they included SEMI-CONDUCTORS

their solid state could be shrunk, and shrunk, and shrunk some more

more reliable

QUICKER

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Transistors

electromechanical computing was replaced by ELECTRICAL computing

​

​Transistors were developed in 1947

Match

match the device or component

• Transistor

• vacuum tube

• relay

• BOMBE

• Harvard Mark I

solid state component

electro-mechanical part

mechanical switch

electro- mechanical English computer

500 wirse and still slow

• solid state component

• electro-mechanical part

• mechanical switch

• electro- mechanical English computer

• 500 wirse and still slow

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Why does this matter?