The history of computer science began long before the modern discipline of
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
, usually appearing in forms like
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
or
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
. Developments in previous centuries alluded to the discipline that we now know as computer science.
This progression, from mechanical inventions and
mathematical
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
theories towards
modern computer concepts and machines, led to the development of a major academic field, massive technological advancement across the
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to the various nations and state (polity), states in the regions of Europe, North America, and Oceania. , and the basis of a massive worldwide trade and culture.
Prehistory
![John Napier](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/John_Napier.JPG)
The earliest known tool for use in computation was the
abacus
The abacus (''plural'' abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool which has been used since ancient times. It was used in the ancient Near East, Europe, China, and Russia, centuries before the adoption of the Hin ...
, developed in the period between 2700 and 2300 BCE in
Sumer
Sumer () is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (south-central Iraq), emerging during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC. It is one of the cradles of c ...
. The Sumerians' abacus consisted of a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their
sexagesimal
Sexagesimal, also known as base 60 or sexagenary, is a numeral system with sixty as its base. It originated with the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC, was passed down to the ancient Babylonians, and is still used—in a modified form ...
number system.
Its original style of usage was by lines drawn in sand with pebbles. Abaci of a more modern design are still used as calculation tools today, such as the
Chinese abacus
The suanpan (), also spelled suan pan or souanpan) is an abacus of Chinese origin first described in a 190 CE book of the Eastern Han Dynasty, namely ''Supplementary Notes on the Art of Figures'' written by Xu Yue. However, the exact design o ...
.
In the 5th century BC in
ancient India
According to consensus in modern genetics, anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago. Quote: "Y-Chromosome and Mt-DNA data support the colonization of South Asia by m ...
, the
grammarian Pāṇini
, era = ;;6th–5th century BCE
, region = Indian philosophy
, main_interests = Grammar, linguistics
, notable_works = ' (Sanskrit#Classical Sanskrit, Classical Sanskrit)
, influenced=
, notable_ideas=Descript ...
formulated the
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
of
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
in 3959 rules known as the
Ashtadhyayi which was highly systematized and technical. Panini used metarules,
transformations and
recursion
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics ...
s.
The
Antikythera mechanism
The Antikythera mechanism ( ) is an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the oldest example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomy, astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. It could also be ...
is believed to be an early mechanical analog computer.
It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in the
Antikythera
Antikythera or Anticythera ( ) is a Greek island lying on the edge of the Aegean Sea, between Crete and Peloponnese. In antiquity the island was known as (). Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality of Kythira islan ...
wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and
Crete
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and ...
, and has been dated to ''circa'' 100 BC.
Mechanical analog computer devices appeared again a thousand years later in the
medieval Islamic world
The Islamic Golden Age was a period of cultural, economic, and scientific flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 14th century. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign ...
and were developed by
Muslim astronomers
Islamic astronomy comprises the Astronomy, astronomical developments made in the Islamic world, particularly during the Islamic Golden Age (9th–13th centuries), and mostly written in the Arabic language. These developments mostly took place in ...
, such as the mechanical geared
astrolabe
An astrolabe ( grc, ἀστρολάβος ; ar, ٱلأَسْطُرلاب ; persian, ستارهیاب ) is an ancient astronomical instrument that was a handheld model of the universe. Its various functions also make it an elaborate inclin ...
by
Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī
Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973 – after 1050) commonly known as al-Biruni, was a Khwarazmian Iranian in scholar and polymath during the Islamic Golden Age. He has been called variously the "founder of Indology", "Father of Co ...
,
and the
torquetum
The ''torquetum'' or turquet is a medieval astronomical instrument designed to take and convert measurements made in three sets of coordinates: Horizon, equatorial, and ecliptic. It is said to be a combination of Ptolemy's astrolabon and the p ...
by
Jabir ibn Aflah
Abū Muḥammad Jābir ibn Aflaḥ ( ar, أبو محمد جابر بن أفلح, la, Geber/Gebir; 1100–1150) was an Arab Muslim astronomer and mathematician from Seville, who was active in 12th century al-Andalus. His work ''Iṣlāḥ al-Ma ...
. According to
Simon Singh
Simon Lehna Singh, (born 19 September 1964) is a British popular science author, theoretical and particle physicist. His written works include ''Fermat's Last Theorem'' (in the United States titled ''Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve th ...
,
Muslim mathematicians
Mathematics during the Golden Age of Islam, especially during the 9th and 10th centuries, was built on Greek mathematics (Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius) and Indian mathematics (Aryabhata, Brahmagupta). Important progress was made, such as ...
also made important advances in
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
, such as the development of
cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic sec ...
and
frequency analysis
In cryptanalysis, frequency analysis (also known as counting letters) is the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a ciphertext. The method is used as an aid to breaking classical ciphers.
Frequency analysis is based on t ...
by
Alkindus
Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (; ar, أبو يوسف يعقوب بن إسحاق الصبّاح الكندي; la, Alkindus; c. 801–873 AD) was an Arab Muslim philosopher, polymath, mathematician, physicia ...
.
Programmable machines were also invented by
Muslim engineers, such as the automatic
flute
The flute is a family of classical music instrument in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, meaning they make sound by vibrating a column of air. However, unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is a reedless ...
player by the
Banū Mūsā
The Banū Mūsā brothers ("Sons of Moses"), namely Abū Jaʿfar, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (before 803 – February 873); Abū al‐Qāsim, Aḥmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (d. 9th century); and Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (d. 9th ce ...
brothers,
[.] and
Al-Jazari
Badīʿ az-Zaman Abu l-ʿIzz ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136–1206, ar, بديع الزمان أَبُ اَلْعِزِ إبْنُ إسْماعِيلِ إبْنُ الرِّزاز الجزري, ) was a polymath: a scholar, ...
's programmable
castle clock
Clock towers are a specific type of structure which house a turret clock and have one or more clock faces on the upper exterior walls. Many clock towers are freestanding structures but they can also adjoin or be located on top of another buildi ...
, which is considered to be the first programmable analog computer.
Technological artifacts of similar complexity appeared in 14th century
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
, with mechanical
astronomical clock
An astronomical clock, horologium, or orloj is a clock with special mechanisms and dials to display astronomical information, such as the relative positions of the Sun, Moon, zodiacal constellations, and sometimes major planets.
Definition
...
s.
When
John Napier
John Napier of Merchiston (; 1 February 1550 – 4 April 1617), nicknamed Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchiston. His Latinized name was Ioann ...
discovered logarithms for computational purposes in the early 17th century, there followed a period of considerable progress by inventors and scientists in making calculating tools. In 1623
Wilhelm Schickard
Wilhelm Schickard (22 April 1592 – 24 October 1635) was a German professor of Hebrew and astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Franz Hammer, a biographer (along with Max Caspar) of Johannes Kepler, claim ...
designed a calculating machine, but abandoned the project, when the prototype he had started building was destroyed by a fire in 1624. Around 1640,
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal ( , , ; ; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic Church, Catholic writer.
He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pa ...
, a leading French mathematician, constructed a mechanical adding device based on a design described by
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
mathematician
Hero of Alexandria
Hero of Alexandria (; grc-gre, Ἥρων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς, ''Heron ho Alexandreus'', also known as Heron of Alexandria ; 60 AD) was a Greece, Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria, Roman Egy ...
. Then in 1672
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
invented the
Stepped Reckoner which he completed in 1694.
[, p.38-42, translated and edited from ]
In 1837
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.
Babbage is considered ...
first described his
Analytical Engine
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a des ...
which is accepted as the first design for a modern computer. The analytical engine had expandable memory, an arithmetic unit, and logic processing capabilities able to interpret a programming language with loops and conditional branching. Although never built, the design has been studied extensively and is understood to be
Turing equivalent. The analytical engine would have had a memory capacity of less than 1 kilobyte of memory and a clock speed of less than 10 Hertz.
Considerable advancement in mathematics and electronics theory was required before the first modern computers could be designed.
Binary logic
In 1702,
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
developed
logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...
in a formal, mathematical sense with his writings on the binary numeral system. In his system, the ones and zeros also represent ''true'' and ''false'' values or ''on'' and ''off'' states. But it took more than a century before
George Boole
George Boole (; 2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ire ...
published his
Boolean algebra
In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra. It differs from elementary algebra in two ways. First, the values of the variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denoted 1 and 0, whereas in e ...
in 1854 with a complete system that allowed computational processes to be mathematically modeled.
By this time, the first mechanical devices driven by a binary pattern had been invented. The
industrial revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
had driven forward the mechanization of many tasks, and this included
weaving
Weaving is a method of textile production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interlaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. Other methods are knitting, crocheting, felting, and braiding or plaiting. The longitudinal th ...
.
Punched cards
A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to d ...
controlled
Joseph Marie Jacquard
Joseph Marie Charles ''dit'' (called or nicknamed) Jacquard (; 7 July 1752 – 7 August 1834) was a French weaver and merchant. He played an important role in the development of the earliest programmable loom (the " Jacquard loom"), which in tu ...
's loom in 1801, where a hole punched in the card indicated a binary ''one'' and an unpunched spot indicated a binary ''zero''. Jacquard's loom was far from being a computer, but it did illustrate that machines could be driven by binary systems.
Emergence of a discipline
Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.
Babbage is considered ...
is often regarded as one of the first pioneers of computing. Beginning in the 1810s, Babbage had a vision of mechanically computing numbers and tables. Putting this into reality, Babbage designed a calculator to compute numbers up to 8 decimal points long. Continuing with the success of this idea, Babbage worked to develop a machine that could compute numbers with up to 20 decimal places. By the 1830s, Babbage had devised a plan to develop a machine that could use punched cards to perform arithmetical operations. The machine would store numbers in memory units, and there would be a form of sequential control. This means that one operation would be carried out before another in such a way that the machine would produce an answer and not fail. This machine was to be known as the “Analytical Engine”, which was the first true representation of what is the modern computer.
Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the A ...
(Augusta Ada Byron) is credited as the pioneer of computer programming and is regarded as a mathematical genius. Lovelace began working with Charles Babbage as an assistant while Babbage was working on his "Analytical Engine", the first mechanical computer. During her work with Babbage, Ada Lovelace became the designer of the first computer algorithm, which had the ability to compute
Bernoulli numbers
In mathematics, the Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of rational numbers which occur frequently in analysis. The Bernoulli numbers appear in (and can be defined by) the Taylor series expansions of the tangent and hyperbolic tangent functions, ...
, although this is arguable as Charles was the first to design the difference engine and consequently its corresponding difference based algorithms, making him the first computer algorithm designer. Moreover, Lovelace's work with Babbage resulted in her prediction of future computers to not only perform mathematical calculations, but also manipulate symbols, mathematical or not. While she was never able to see the results of her work, as the "Analytical Engine" was not created in her lifetime, her efforts in later years, beginning in the 1840s, did not go unnoticed.
Contributions to Babbage's Analytical Engine during the first half of the 20th century
Following Babbage, although at first unaware of his earlier work, was
Percy Ludgate
Percy Edwin Ludgate (2 August 1883 – 16 October 1922) was an Irish amateur scientist who designed the second analytical engine (general-purpose Turing-complete computer) in history.
Life
Ludgate was born on 2 August 1883 in Skibbereen, ...
, a clerk to a corn merchant in Dublin, Ireland. He independently designed a programmable mechanical computer, which he described in a work that was published in 1909. Two other inventors,
Leonardo Torres y Quevedo
Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (; 28 December 1852 – 18 December 1936) was a Spanish civil engineer and mathematician of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Torres was a pioneer in the development of the radio control and automated ...
and
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...
, also did follow on research based on Babbage's work. In his ''Essays on Automatics'' (1913) Torres y Quevedo designed a Babbage type of calculating machine that used electromechanical parts which included
floating point number
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be r ...
representations and built a prototype in 1920. Bush's paper ''Instrumental Analysis'' (1936) discussed using existing IBM punch card machines to implement Babbage's design. In the same year he started the Rapid Arithmetical Machine project to investigate the problems of constructing an electronic digital computer.
Charles Sanders Peirce and electrical switching circuits
![Charles Sanders Peirce theb3558](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Charles_Sanders_Peirce_theb3558.jpg)
In an 1886 letter,
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".
Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...
described how logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits.
[Peirce, C. S., "Letter, Peirce to A. Marquand", dated 1886, '' Writings of Charles S. Peirce'', v. 5, 1993, pp. 421–23. See Burks, Arthur W., "Review: Charles S. Peirce, ''The new elements of mathematics''", ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'' v. 84, n. 5 (1978), pp. 913–18, see 917]
PDF Eprint
During 1880–81 he showed that
NOR gates alone (or alternatively
NAND gates alone) can be used to reproduce the functions of all the other
logic gate
A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, a logical operation performed on one or more binary inputs that produces a single binary output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, ...
s, but this work on it was unpublished until 1933. The first published proof was by
Henry M. Sheffer in 1913, so the NAND logical operation is sometimes called
Sheffer stroke
In Boolean functions and propositional calculus, the Sheffer stroke denotes a logical operation that is equivalent to the logical negation, negation of the logical conjunction, conjunction operation, expressed in ordinary language as "not both". ...
; the
logical NOR is sometimes called ''Peirce's arrow''.
Consequently, these gates are sometimes called ''universal logic gates''.
Eventually,
vacuum tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied.
The type kn ...
s replaced relays for logic operations.
Lee De Forest
Lee de Forest (August 26, 1873 – June 30, 1961) was an American inventor and a fundamentally important early pioneer in electronics. He invented the first electronic device for controlling current flow; the three-element "Audion" triode va ...
's modification, in 1907, of the
Fleming valve
The Fleming valve, also called the Fleming oscillation valve, was a thermionic valve or vacuum tube invented in 1904 by English physicist John Ambrose Fleming as a detector for early radio receivers used in electromagnetic wireless telegraphy. ...
can be used as a logic gate.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...
introduced a version of the 16-row
truth table
A truth table is a mathematical table used in logic—specifically in connection with Boolean algebra, boolean functions, and propositional calculus—which sets out the functional values of logical expressions on each of their functional argumen ...
as proposition 5.101 of ''
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) is a book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein which deals with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define the ...
'' (1921).
Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
, inventor of the
coincidence circuit In physics and electrical engineering, a coincidence circuit or coincidence gate is an electronic device with one output and two (or more) inputs. The output activates only when the circuit receives signals within a time window accepted as ''at the ...
, got part of the 1954
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...
in physics, for the first modern electronic AND gate in 1924.
Konrad Zuse
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-c ...
designed and built electromechanical logic gates for his computer
Z1 (from 1935 to 1938).
Up to and during the 1930s, electrical engineers were able to build electronic circuits to solve mathematical and logic problems, but most did so in an ''ad hoc'' manner, lacking any theoretical rigor. This changed with
switching circuit theory
Switching circuit theory is the mathematical study of the properties of networks of idealized switches. Such networks may be strictly combinational logic, in which their output state is only a function of the present state of their inputs; or ma ...
in the 1930s. From 1934 to 1936,
Akira Nakashima
Akira Nakashima (中嶋 章 or 中島 章, also written as ''Nakashima Akira'', ''Nakasima Akira'' or ''Nakajima Akira'', 5 January 1908 – 29 October 1970) was a Japanese electrical engineer of the NEC.
He got a bachelor's degree in electri ...
,
Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American people, American mathematician, electrical engineering, electrical engineer, and cryptography, cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-o ...
, and Viktor Shetakov published a series of papers showing that the
two-valued Boolean algebra
In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra. It differs from elementary algebra in two ways. First, the values of the variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denoted 1 and 0, whereas in e ...
, can describe the operation of switching circuits.
[Radomir S. Stanković (]University of Niš
The University of Niš ( sr, Универзитет у Нишу, Univerzitet u Nišu) is a public university in Serbia. It was founded in 1965 and consists of 13 faculties with 1,492 academic staff and around 20,500 students (as of 2018–19 sch ...
), Jaakko T. Astola (Tampere University of Technology
Tampere University of Technology (TUT) ( fi, Tampereen teknillinen yliopisto (TTY)) was Finland's second-largest university in engineering sciences. The university was located in Hervanta, a suburb of Tampere. It was merged with the University o ...
), Mark G. Karpovsky (Boston University
Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...
)
Some Historical Remarks on Switching Theory
2007, DOI 10.1.1.66.1248[ (3+207+1 pages)]
10:00 min
This concept, of utilizing the properties of electrical switches to do logic, is the basic concept that underlies all electronic
digital computer
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These pro ...
s. Switching circuit theory provided the mathematical foundations and tools for
digital system
Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. This is in contrast to analog electronics and analog signals.
Digital electronic circuits are usually ...
design in almost all areas of modern technology.
While taking an undergraduate philosophy class, Shannon had been exposed to
Boole's work, and recognized that it could be used to arrange electromechanical relays (then used in telephone routing switches) to solve logic problems. His thesis became the foundation of practical digital circuit design when it became widely known among the electrical engineering community during and after World War II.
Alan Turing and the Turing machine
Before the 1920s, ''
computers
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These programs ...
'' (sometimes ''computors'') were human clerks that performed computations. They were usually under the lead of a physicist. Many thousands of computers were employed in commerce, government, and research establishments. Many of these clerks who served as human computers were women. Some performed astronomical calculations for calendars, others ballistic tables for the military.
After the 1920s, the expression ''computing machine'' referred to any machine that performed the work of a human computer, especially those in accordance with effective methods of the
Church-Turing thesis. The thesis states that a mathematical method is effective if it could be set out as a list of instructions able to be followed by a human clerk with paper and pencil, for as long as necessary, and without ingenuity or insight.
Machines that computed with continuous values became known as the ''analog'' kind. They used machinery that represented continuous numeric quantities, like the angle of a shaft rotation or difference in electrical potential.
Digital machinery, in contrast to analog, were able to render a state of a numeric value and store each individual digit. Digital machinery used difference engines or relays before the invention of faster memory devices.
The phrase ''computing machine'' gradually gave way, after the late 1940s, to just ''computer'' as the onset of electronic digital machinery became common. These computers were able to perform the calculations that were performed by the previous human clerks.
Since the values stored by digital machines were not bound to physical properties like analog devices, a logical computer, based on digital equipment, was able to do anything that could be described "purely mechanical." The theoretical
Turing Machine
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algori ...
, created by
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...
, is a hypothetical device theorized in order to study the properties of such hardware.
The mathematical foundations of modern computer science began to be laid by
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an imme ...
with his
incompleteness theorem
Complete may refer to:
Logic
* Completeness (logic)
* Completeness of a theory, the property of a theory that every formula in the theory's language or its negation is provable
Mathematics
* The completeness of the real numbers, which implies t ...
(1931). In this theorem, he showed that there were limits to what could be proved and disproved within a
formal system
A formal system is an abstract structure used for inferring theorems from axioms according to a set of rules. These rules, which are used for carrying out the inference of theorems from axioms, are the logical calculus of the formal system.
A form ...
. This led to work by Gödel and others to define and describe these formal systems, including concepts such as
mu-recursive function
In mathematical logic and computer science, a general recursive function, partial recursive function, or μ-recursive function is a partial function from natural numbers to natural numbers that is "computable" in an intuitive sense – as well as i ...
s and
lambda-definable functions.
In 1936 Alan Turing and
Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, philosopher, professor and editor who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer scienc ...
independently, and also together, introduced the formalization of an
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
, with limits on what can be computed, and a "purely mechanical" model for computing.
This became the
Church–Turing thesis
In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis (also known as computability thesis, the Turing–Church thesis, the Church–Turing conjecture, Church's thesis, Church's conjecture, and Turing's thesis) is a thesis about the nature of comp ...
, a hypothesis about the nature of mechanical calculation devices, such as electronic computers. The thesis states that any calculation that is possible can be performed by an algorithm running on a computer, provided that sufficient time and storage space are available.
In 1936,
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...
also published his seminal work on the
Turing machine
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algori ...
s, an abstract digital computing machine which is now simply referred to as the
Universal Turing machine
In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine that can simulate an arbitrary Turing machine on arbitrary input. The universal machine essentially achieves this by reading both the description of the machine to be simu ...
. This machine invented the principle of the modern computer and was the birthplace of the
stored program
A stored-program computer is a computer that stores program instructions in electronically or optically accessible memory. This contrasts with systems that stored the program instructions with plugboards or similar mechanisms.
The definition i ...
concept that almost all modern day computers use.
These hypothetical machines were designed to formally determine, mathematically, what can be computed, taking into account limitations on computing ability. If a Turing machine can complete the task, it is considered
Turing computable
Computable functions are the basic objects of study in computability theory. Computable functions are the formalized analogue of the intuitive notion of algorithms, in the sense that a function is computable if there exists an algorithm that can d ...
.
The
Los Alamos physicist
Stanley Frankel
Stanley Phillips Frankel (1919 – May, 1978) was an American computer scientist. He worked in the Manhattan Project and developed various computers as a consultant.
Early life
He was born in Los Angeles, attended graduate school at the Univers ...
, has described
John von Neumann
John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...
's view of the fundamental importance of Turing's 1936 paper, in a letter:
Early computer hardware
The world's first electronic digital computer, the
Atanasoff–Berry computer, was built on the Iowa State campus from 1939 through 1942 by
John V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics, and
Clifford Berry
Clifford Edward Berry (April 19, 1918 – October 30, 1963) helped John Vincent Atanasoff create the first digital electronic computer in 1939, the Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC).
Biography
Clifford Berry was born April 19, 1918, in Gladbr ...
, an engineering graduate student.
In 1941,
Konrad Zuse
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-c ...
developed the world's first functional program-controlled computer, the
Z3. In 1998, it was shown to be
Turing-complete
In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing-complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Tur ...
in principle. Zuse also developed the S2 computing machine, considered the first
process control
An industrial process control in continuous production processes is a discipline that uses industrial control systems to achieve a production level of consistency, economy and safety which could not be achieved purely by human manual control. I ...
computer. He founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941, producing the
Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. In 1946, he designed the first
high-level programming language
In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong Abstraction (computer science), abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ...
,
Plankalkül
Plankalkül () is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. It was the first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer.
''Kalkül'' is the German term for a formal system ...
.
[Talk given by ]Horst Zuse
Horst Zuse (born November 17, 1945) is a German computer scientist.
Life
Horst Zuse was born in 1945 as the son of the computer pioneer Konrad Zuse. He first studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and later on comp ...
to the Computer Conservation Society
The Computer Conservation Society (CCS) is a British organisation, founded in 1989. It is under the joint umbrella of the British Computer Society (BCS), the London Science Museum and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry.
Overview
The ...
at the Science Museum (London)
The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and is one of the city's major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually in 2019.
Like other publicly funded ...
on 18 November 2010
In 1948, the
Manchester Baby
The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic Calland Williams, Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Ge ...
was completed; it was the world's first electronic digital computer that ran programs stored in its memory, like almost all modern computers.
The influence on
Max Newman
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984), generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operatio ...
of Turing's seminal 1936 paper on the
Turing Machines
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algori ...
and of his logico-mathematical contributions to the project, were both crucial to the successful development of the Baby.
In 1950, Britain's
National Physical Laboratory completed
Pilot ACE
The Pilot ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) was one of the first computers built in the United Kingdom. Built at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the early 1950s, it was also one of the earliest general-purpose, stored-program computers ...
, a small scale programmable computer, based on Turing's philosophy. With an operating speed of 1 MHz, the Pilot Model ACE was for some time the fastest computer in the world.
Turing's design for
ACE
An ace is a playing card, die or domino with a single pip. In the standard French deck, an ace has a single suit symbol (a heart, diamond, spade, or club) located in the middle of the card, sometimes large and decorated, especially in the c ...
had much in common with today's
RISC
In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set comput ...
architectures and it called for a high-speed memory of roughly the same capacity as an early
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
computer, which was enormous by the standards of his day.
Had Turing's ACE been built as planned and in full, it would have been in a different league from the other early computers.
![ClaudeShannon MFO3807](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/ClaudeShannon_MFO3807.jpg)
The first actual computer bug was a
moth
Moths are a paraphyletic group of insects that includes all members of the order Lepidoptera that are not butterflies, with moths making up the vast majority of the order. There are thought to be approximately 160,000 species of moth, many of w ...
. It was stuck in between the relays on the Harvard Mark II.
While the invention of the term 'bug' is often but erroneously attributed to Grace Hopper, a future rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, who supposedly logged the "bug" on September 9, 1945, most other accounts conflict at least with these details. According to these accounts, the actual date was September 9, 1947 when operators filed this 'incident' — along with the insect and the notation "First actual case of bug being found" (see software bug for details).
Shannon and information theory
Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American people, American mathematician, electrical engineering, electrical engineer, and cryptography, cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-o ...
went on to found the field of information theory with his 1948 paper titled A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which applied probability theory to the problem of how to best encode the information a sender wants to transmit. This work is one of the theoretical foundations for many areas of study, including data compression and
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
.
Wiener and cybernetics
From experiments with anti-aircraft systems that interpreted radar images to detect enemy planes, Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics from the Greek word for "steersman." He published "Cybernetics" in 1948, which influenced artificial intelligence. Wiener also compared computation, computing machinery, computer memory, memory devices, and other cognitive similarities with his analysis of brain waves.
John von Neumann and the von Neumann architecture
In 1946, a model for computer architecture was introduced and became known as ''Von Neumann architecture''. Since 1950, the von Neumann model provided uniformity in subsequent computer designs. The von Neumann architecture was considered innovative as it introduced an idea of allowing machine instructions and data to share memory space. The von Neumann model is composed of three major parts, the arithmetic logic unit (ALU), the memory, and the instruction processing unit (IPU). In von Neumann machine design, the IPU passes addresses to memory, and memory, in turn, is routed either back to the IPU if an instruction is being fetched or to the ALU if data is being fetched.
Von Neumann's machine design uses a RISC (Reduced instruction set computing) architecture, which means the instruction set uses a total of 21 instructions to perform all tasks. (This is in contrast to CISC, complex instruction set computing, instruction sets which have more instructions from which to choose.) With von Neumann architecture, main memory along with the accumulator (the register that holds the result of logical operations)
are the two memories that are addressed. Operations can be carried out as simple arithmetic (these are performed by the ALU and include addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), conditional branches (these are more commonly seen now as
if
statements or
while
loops. The branches serve as
go to
statements), and logical moves between the different components of the machine, i.e., a move from the accumulator to memory or vice versa. Von Neumann architecture accepts fractions and instructions as data types. Finally, as the von Neumann architecture is a simple one, its register management is also simple. The architecture uses a set of seven registers to manipulate and interpret fetched data and instructions. These registers include the "IR" (instruction register), "IBR" (instruction buffer register), "MQ" (multiplier quotient register), "MAR" (memory address register), and "MDR" (memory data register)."
The architecture also uses a program counter ("PC") to keep track of where in the program the machine is.
John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and artificial intelligence
The term artificial intelligence was credited by John McCarthy to explain the research that they were doing for a proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, Dartmouth Summer Research. The naming of artificial intelligence also led to the birth of a new field in computer science. On August 31, 1955, a research project was proposed consisting of John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester (computer scientist), Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, Claude E. Shannon. The official project began in 1956 that consisted of several significant parts they felt would help them better understand artificial intelligence's makeup.
McCarthy and his colleagues' ideas behind automatic computers was while a machine is capable of completing a task, then the same should be confirmed with a computer by compiling a Computer program, program to perform the desired results. They also discovered that the human brain was too complex to replicate, not by the machine itself but by the program. The knowledge to produce a program that sophisticated was not there yet.
The concept behind this was looking at how humans understand our own language and structure of how we form sentences, giving different meaning and rule sets and comparing them to a machine process.
The way computers can understand is at a hardware level. This language is written in Binary number, binary (1s and 0's). This has to be written in a specific format that gives the computer the ruleset to run a particular hardware piece.
Minsky's process determined how these Artificial neural network, artificial neural networks could be arranged to have similar qualities to the human brain. However, he could only produce partial results and needed to further the research into this idea.
McCarthy and Shannon's idea behind this theory was to develop a way to use complex problems to determine and measure the machine's efficiency through A Mathematical Theory of Communication, mathematical theory and Computational complexity theory, computations. However, they were only to receive partial test results.
The idea behind self-improvement is how a machine would use self-modifying code to make itself smarter. This would allow for a machine to grow in intelligence and increase calculation speeds. The group believed they could study this if a machine could improve upon the process of completing a task in the abstractions part of their research.
The group thought that research in this category could be broken down into smaller groups. This would consist of sensory and other forms of information about artificial intelligence.
Abstraction (computer science), Abstractions in computer science can refer to mathematics and programming language.
Their idea of computational creativity is how the program or a machine can be seen in having similar ways of human thinking.
They wanted to see if a machine could take a piece of incomplete information and improve upon it to fill in the missing details as the human mind can do. If this machine could do this; they needed to think of how did the machine determine the outcome.
See also
* Computer museum
* List of computer term etymologies, the origins of computer science words
* List of pioneers in computer science
* History of computing
* History of computing hardware
* History of software
* History of personal computers
* Timeline of algorithms
* Timeline of women in computing
* Timeline of computing 2020–present
References
Sources
*
*
Further reading
*
* Kak, Subhash : Computing Science in Ancient India; Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd (2001)
The Development of Computer Science: A Sociocultural PerspectiveMatti Tedre's Ph.D. Thesis, University of Joensuu (2006)
*
*
External links
{{Commonscat
Computer History MuseumComputers: From the Past to the Presentat the Naval History and Heritage Command Photo Archives.
Bitsavers an effort to capture, salvage, and archive historical computer software and manuals from minicomputers and mainframes of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s
Oral history interviews
History of computer science,
History of science by discipline, Computer science
History of computing