5,000 years ago - Abacus

The abacus was used for centuries to carry out calculations on trading transactions.

1642 - Blaise Pascal

A Frenchman who invented the numerical wheel calculator to aid his fathers profession as a French tax collector.

1812 - Charles Babbage

Frustrated at the many mistakes found whilst examining calculations for the Royal Astronomical Society, Charles Babbage applied the ability of machines to the needs of mathematics, thus developing Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Powered by steam and the size of a locomotive the idea used perforated cards to instrict the machine.

1889 - Herman Hollerith

Using the Jacquard loom concept, the American inventor developed a faster way to compute the USA's census. The machine he developed used cards to store information that were fed into the machine and results were compiled mechanically.

Hollerith's Machine

(Image courtesy of Computer History Museum)

Each punch card represented one number and combinations of two punches represented one letter.

Both businesses and government used punch cards for data processing until the 1960's

1938 - Konrad Zuse

Konrad Zuse

(Image courtesy of Computer History Museum)

This German engineer developed and built the worlds first binary digital computer, the Z1.

World War II saw many developments in computing as governments looked for ways to exploit their own strategic importance and put themselves in an advantageous position against the enemy. Their was a sudden enhanced development of a number of ordnance devices to counter an increase in technology on attacking devices.

1941 - Konrad Zuse

In developing the Z1, the Z3 computer was produced to aid the design of airplanes and missiles. This was the first fully functional program controlled electromechanical digital computer. (Computer History Museum).

Gordon Riocreux remembering the use of Morse code during World War II and his experience of a mechanical calculator after the war.

1943 - Colossus

The British developed the Colossus machine to decode German messages. This machine was developed in great secrecy by the Post Office Research Station for the Government Code and Cipher School, Bletchley Park Buckinghamshire.

During the war the Germans used two classes of machine, the Enigma Series and the Gehelmschreiber System, to encode signals prior to transmission. Both machines scrambled the letters of the message by a complicated, virtually non-repeating mechanism of stepping rotors, making the encoded signal extremely difficult to decipher. Colossus was designed as an all electronic deciphering computer. (Lavington. S., 1980).

1944 - Howard. H. Aiken

An American inventor and Harvard engineer who produced the all electronic calculator. This was half the size of a football pitch and consisted of 500 miles of wiring!

The mid 1940's saw concepts in computer design being introduced and initiated. These remained central to computer engineering for the next 40 years.

1945 - Jon Von Neumann

Jon Von Neumann

(Image courtesy of Computer History Museum)

This Hungarian born inventor produced EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Compiler). The development of this machine saw computer memory expanding and being able to hold a stored program as well as data.

John Silk talking about punch cards

1946 - ENIAC

Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. John Mauchly and J Eckert demonstrated that high speed digital computing was possible using the then available vacuum tube technology. This first large scale general purpose electronic computer laid the foundations for the modern electronic computing industry. (Goldschmidt and Akera., 1998).

1946 - Summer School

An inspiring summer school was held at the University of Pennsylvania computing. The free public lectures, held in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, stimulated and inspired the construction of stored program computers at universities and research institutions. This led to the development of other such machines as the EDSAC, 1949, the first practical stored program computer at Cambridge University.

EDSAC at Cambridge University

(Image courtesy of Computer History Museum)

John Silk explains the role of information retrieval of chemical literature and punch cards

1948 - The Transistor

The invention of the transistor replaced the large vacuum tube in television's, radio's and computers therefore enabling their decrease in size.

Transistor

(Image courtesy of Computer History Museum)