INTRODUCTION
In
1965 the government could not have purchased a hand calculator
for any amount of money, but the possibility of a computer that
could do differential equations existed as far back as 1931.
The device, called a "differential analyzer," could
only do differential equations, it was mechanical, and it completely
filled a room. Computers as we now know them began profoundly
impacting us and everything around us starting in the 1980s,
but technologies designed to enhance our ability to calculate
go back for millennia. In fact, they go back to the very origins
of civilization.
Arguably,
writing, itself, was a new technology "invented" to
facilitate the measure and management of the king's inventory,
but the first computing technologies even predate that. Before
there were numbers, objects (e.g., fingers, twigs, pebbles)
were used for counting things, and before there was arithmetic
as we currently understand it, there were counting boards, coin
boards, apices, and the abacus (originally called an "abax").
In
this section, we examine the history of computing all the way
back to the origins of counting. Why
a history of computers or even a history of numbers? Understanding
how technologies work comes from a foundation of knowledge
of how the technologies got here. The very language we use in
our day do day work comes from this foundation. For example,
a commonly used explanation for why we use the term “boot”
to describe how computers start up is that they are capable
of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. First, that virtually
universal explanation is not true. Secondly, even if it were
true, why would anybody ever have attributed the ability to
pull itself up by its bootstraps to a computer? The answer can
be found in the early history of the mainframes.
What
should you take from this section? Computers did not simply
and suddenly evolve. They evolved as we did. They are a direct
result of the way we think, and they describe how we know. People
who understand how computers evolved from simple counting machines
to the complicated devices we currently use, also understand
how contemporary computers think -- and, more importantly, how
we think. NEXT
