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History of computing
History of computer development
History of computing
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Ada Lovelace is often referred to as the world's first computer programmer. Which is a little surprising, since she died roughly one hundred years before the computer as we know it was invented.
She was born Augusta Ada Byron in London on December 10, 1815. Her father Lord Byron, the famous poet, and Lady Byron separated early in Ada's life. Her father died when Ada was only eight years old; she never got to know him.
Lady Byron was adamant that Ada not turn out like her father and focused her education math and science. Even thought it was abnormal of women for the time period, both Ada and her mother were adept at mathematics. This helped introduce them to Charles Babbage.
Lovelace met Charles Babbage in 1833. At that time, Babbage was working on his difference machine, which he created to calculate values of polynomials. He was
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It was designed to be programmable using punched cards and loops. It even had a sort of "memory".
Babbage was impressed by Ada and called her an "enchantress of numbers". They continued to correspond over the years. When Lovelace was asked to translate a transcript of one of Babbage's lectures into English, Babbage insisted that she add her own notes about the analytical engine. Her notes were three times longer than the original transcript.
In her notes, she explained the details of the analytical engine and how it worked. She included an algorithm that could be used by the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. Essentially, it was the first program written for a computer.
While this is the reason that Ada Lovelace is famous and regarded as the first computer programmer, she also had a remarkable insight into the future of computers. While most were focused on computers used for calculations, Ada realized that other things, like music or letters or images, could be translated into numbers, which could then be processed by computers.
Lovelace
Lucretia Mott quickly became a women's rights leader throughout the 19th century by demanding equal opportunities for all women. Lucretia empowered all women by speaking loudly for both abolition and women's rights, creating the female anti slavery society and she by being the democratic leader of the woman's rights movement. She is known as a "radical reformer, gentle nonresistant, and a militant advocate of women's rights" because throughout the course of her life she influenced the current thought of America from a nation of "small shopkeepers and farmers into the Industrial Age" (Bacon 6). During the 19th century she was an empowerment to women. She lead the women's rights movement and never backed down to anyone, she fought for what was
Admiral Grace Murray Hopper is known as one of the first female computer scientists and the mother of Corbel programming. Hopper was born on December 9, 1906 in New York City and was the oldest of three children. Even as a child she loved played with gadgets, disassembling items such an alarm clocks to determine how they worked (Norman). Hopper parents and siblings had a huge impact on her life. Her father who was a successful insurance broker inspired Hopper to pursue higher education and not limit her to typical feminine roles during that time (Norman). Hopper excelled in school graduating from Vassar College in 1928 with a BA in mathematic and physics (Rajaraman 2). She later went on to receive her MA in mathematics from Yale University in 1930 and her PhD in 1943 (Rajaraman 2).
Grace Murray Hopper, born December 9, 1906, was a Math professor that enlisted in the United States Navy at the start of World War II. Over the time of her enlistment, Hopper developed several new programming languages, including COBOL, which is still one of the most used programming languages today. Hopper was also one of the first people to coin the term “computer bug”. Over the course of her life, Grace Hopper influenced many people through her service in the military and led a movement in modern electronics through her work.
Lucretia Mott was one of the first Americans to call publicity for women’s rights. Lucretia was born January 3, 1793. She grew up in a Quaker family. Quakers were one of the first groups to practice equality in men and women. After she finished schooling she became assistant teacher of her school. After 4 years of teaching, she moved to Philadelphia to be with her family. Her life was centered around the Quaker church. She supported abolition. She refused to buy products from slave labor. In 1833 she attended a male antislavery convention. After the convention she founded the Female Antislavery Society. By 1837 she was a speaker at women’s antislavery meetings and conventions. When Lucretia led women to an antislavery convention in 1840, the
Martha graham was born in 1894 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Graham enrolled in an arts-oriented junior college, and later to the newly opened Denishawn School. She found her chance dancing in the vaudeville revue Greenwich Village Follies. At the Greenwich Village Follies, Graham was able to design and choreograph her own dances.
Our imagination turned a mound of dirt into a native village. Janelle Makela is my closest friend and aunt. Since we are only nine months apart, we did lots of crazy things, almost insane, especially when we were younger. Janelle has been a positive influence to me by our adventures when we were younger, our amazing cooking skills, and making anyone smile when anybody is feeling low.
...m simple tasks. Then Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, led by Vannevar Bush, fabricated the first analog computer, which could perform more complicated tasks than the previous computer. The analog computer was improved upon even further by Howard Aiken, who created the first computer with memory (Brinkley 643).
In 1886 Dorr D. Felt (1862 - 1930) invented the "comptometer". This was the first calculator where the operands are entered by just pressing keys. In 1889 in also invents the first printing desk calculator.
Four months after that Lord George departed England and never came back. Ada never got to meet her father who sadly passed away in 1823 and forced her mother to raise her all on her own. Ada’s life was a hard one as put by (Moore, Toole, Baum 1992) “ Her life was an apotheosis of struggle between emotion and reason, subjectivism and objectivist, poetics and mathematics, ill health and burst of energy”. Getting an education at the time as a women was almost unheard of, but Lady Anne wanted Ada to be nothing like her poetical father. She made sure Ada received proper tutoring in music and mathematics because it was thought that those disciplines could counter unwanted poetic tendencies. Ada’s gifts were apparent from an early age showing her talents for language and numbers. Something that most people don’t know about Ada is that at the age of 12 she was visualizing plans for a flying machine. She was intrigued by birds and flight so she soon started studying their anatomy. One of the most important times of Ada’s life was when she moved into an Elite London society along with Lady Anne. Many great minds were known to be living in this area; such as the likes of men who spend their time
Mark I. It was actually a electromechanical calculation. It is said that this was the first potentially computers. In 1951 Remington Rand’s came out with the UNIVAC it began
Computer engineering started about 5,000 years ago in China when they invented the abacus. The abacus is a manual calculator in which you move beads back and forth on rods to add or subtract. Other inventors of simple computers include Blaise Pascal who came up with the arithmetic machine for his father’s work. Also Charles Babbage produced the Analytical Engine, which combined math calculations from one problem and applied it to solve other complex problems. The Analytical Engine is similar to today’s computers.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of famous poet at the time, Lord George Gordon Byron, and mother Anne Isabelle Milbanke, known as “the princess of parallelograms,” a mathematician. A few weeks after Ada Lovelace was born, her parents split. Her father left England and never returned. Women received inferior education that that of a man, but Isabelle Milbanke was more than able to give her daughter a superior education where she focused more on mathematics and science (Bellis). When Ada was 17, she was introduced to Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer and mathematician who’s party she heard Charles Babbage’s idea of the Analytic Engine, a new calculating engine (Toole). Charles Babbage, known as the father of computer invented the different calculators. Babbage became a mentor to Ada and helped her study advance math along with Augustus de Morgan, who was a professor at the University of London (Ada Lovelace Biography Mathematician, Computer Programmer (1815–1852)). In 1842, Charles Babbage presented in a seminar in Turin, his new developments on a new engine. Menabrea, an Italian, wrote a summary article of Babbage’s developments and published the article i...
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.
Technology continued to prosper in the computer world into the nineteenth century. A major figure during this time is Charles Babbage, designed the idea of the Difference Engine in the year 1820. It was a calculating machine designed to tabulate the results of mathematical functions (Evans, 38). Babbage, however, never completed this invention because he came up with a newer creation in which he named the Analytical Engine. This computer was expected to solve “any mathematical problem” (Triumph, 2). It relied on the punch card input. The machine was never actually finished by Babbage, and today Herman Hollerith has been credited with the fabrication of the punch card tabulating machine.
In the early 1800’s, a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage designed an automatic calculation machine. It was steam powered and could store up to 1000 50-digit numbers.