Abacus

The abacus, also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool used primarily in parts of Asia for performing arithmetic processes. Today, abaci are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone, or metal. The abacus was in use centuries before the adoption of the written modern numeral system and is still widely used by merchants, traders and clerks in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. The user of an abacus is called an abacist.

Etymology
The use of the word abacus dates before 1387 AD, when a Middle English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sandboard abacus. The Latin word came from Greek abax "board strewn with sand or dust used for drawing geometric figures or calculating"(the exact shape of the Latin perhaps reflects the genitive form of the Greek word, o abakos). Greek itself is probably a borrowing of a Northwest Semitic, perhaps Phoenician, word akin to Hebrew bq (" ,)dust" (since dust strewn on wooden boards to draw figures in).[3] The preferred plural of abacus is a subject of disagreement, with both abacuses[4] and abaci[5] in use.

Napier's bones
Napier's bonesedn 1617 is an abacus created by John Napier for calculation of products and quotients of numbers that was based on Arab mathematics and lattice multiplicationused by Matrakci Nasuh in the Umdet-ul Hisab and Fibonacci writing in the Liber Abaci. Also called Rabdology (from Greek o [r(h)abdos], "rod" and - [logia], "study"). Napier published his version of rods in a work printed in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the end of 1617 entitled Rabdologi. Using the multiplication tables embedded in the rods, multiplication can be reduced to addition operations and division to subtractions. More advanced use of the rods can even extract square roots. Note that Napier's bones are not the same as logarithms, with which Napier's name is also associated.
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Pascal's calculator
Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical calculator in 1642.[1][2] He conceived the idea while trying to help his father who had been assigned the task of reorganizing the tax revenues of the French province of Haute-Normandie; first called Arithmetic Machine, Pascal's Calculator and later Pascaline, it could add and subtract two numbers directly and multiply and divide by repetition. Pascal went through 50 prototypes before presenting his first machine to the public in 1645. He dedicated it to Pierre Sguier, the chancellor of France at the time.[3] He built around twenty more machines during the next decade, often improving on his original design. Nine machines have survived the centuries,[4] most of them being on display in European museums. In 1649 a royal privilege, signed by Louis XIV of France,[5] gave him the exclusivity of the design and manufacturing of calculating machines in France.

Leibniz wheel
A Leibniz wheel or stepped drum was a cylinder with a set of teeth of incremental lengths which, when coupled to a counting wheel, was used in the calculating engine of a class

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ofmechanical calculators. Invented by Leibniz in 1673, it was used for three centuries until the advent of the electronic calculator in the mid-1970s. Leibniz built a machine called the Stepped Reckoner based on that design in 1694.[1] It was made famous by Thomas de Colmar when he used it, a century and a half later, in hisArithmometer, the first mass-produced calculating machine.[2] It was also used in the Curta calculator, a very popular portable calculator introduced in the second part of the 20th century.

Jacquard weaving
Jacquard weaving makes possible in almost any loom the programmed raising of eachwarp thread independently of the others. This brings much greater versatility to the weavingprocess, and offers the highest level of warp yarn control. This mechanism is probably one of the most important weaving inventions as Jacquard shedding made possible the automatic production of unlimited varieties of pattern weaving. The term "Jacquard" is not specific or limited to any particular loom, but rather refers to the added control mechanism that automates the patterning.

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Difference engine
A difference engine is an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. The name derives from the method of divided differences, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial coefficients. Both logarithmic and trigonometric functions, functions commonly used by both navigators and scientists, can beapproximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers. The historical difficulty in producing error free tables by teams of mathematicians and human "computers" spurred Charles Babbage's desire to build a mechanism to automate the process.

Analytical Engine
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed byEnglish mathematician Charles Babbage.[2] It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a mechanical calculator. The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetical unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops,

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and integrated memory, making it the first Turing-complete design for a general-purpose computer.[3][4] Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding.[5][6] It was not until 100 years later, in the 1940s, that the first general-purpose computers were actually built.

The First Programmer: Lady Ada Lovelace

Lady Ada Lovelace, Lord Byrons daughter, is famous as the First Programmer. She devised a suitable use of the Binary Number system for programs and data to be fed into the Analytical Computer. Ada met Charles Babbage in 1833 and they initiated collaboration on subjects of common interest such as Mathematics and logic. In 1834 Babbage had plans for his new calculating machine The Analytical Engine but it received no support from his sponsors with his first machine still incomplete. In 1842, an Italian Mathematician by the Babbage named Lady Ada Lovelace as the translator for the memoir. Ada worked dedicatedly on the article thereby adding her own notes which is what brought her to fame. It is these notes that contain what is today considered as an algorithm encoded for processing by a machine the first computer program. The notes include a method for calculating the sequence of Bernoulli Numbers with the Engine and would have run correctly if the engine had ever been built.name of Louis Menebrea published a memoir on the Analytical Engine in French.

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Tabulating machine
The tabulating machine was an electrical device designed to assist in summarizing information and, later, accounting. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the machine was developed to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. It spawned a larger class of devices known as unit record equipment and the data processing industry. The term "Super Computing" was first used by the New York World newspaper in 1931 to refer to a large custom-built tabulator that IBM made for Columbia University. The 1880 census had taken seven years to tabulate, and by the time the figures were available, they were clearly obsolete. Due to rapid growth of the U.S. population from 1880 to 1890, primarily because of immigration, it was estimated that the 1890 census would take approximately 13 years to completean immense logistical problem. Since the U.S. Constitution mandates a census every ten years to apportion taxation between the statesand to determine Congressional representation, a faster method was necessary.

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ENIAC
ENIAC ( /ni.k/; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)[1][2] was the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was a Turing-complete digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems.[3] ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army'sBallistic Research Laboratory.[4][5] When ENIAC was announced in 1946 it was heralded in the press as a "Giant Brain". It boasted speeds one thousand times faster than electro-mechanical machines, a leap in computing power that no single machine has since matched. This mathematical power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists. The inventors promoted the spread of these new ideas by conducting a series of lectures on computer architecture. ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army during World War II. The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943, and work on the computer began in secret by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering starting the following month under the code name "Project PX". The completed machine was announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946[6]and formally dedicated the next day[7] at the University of Pennsylvania, having cost almost $500,000 (nearly $6 million in 2010, adjusted for inflation).[8] It was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred toAberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29, 1947, it was turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.

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Harvard Mark I
The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), called the Mark I by Harvard University,[1] was an electro-mechanical computer. The electromechanical ASCC was devised by Howard H. Aiken, built at IBM and shipped to Harvard in February 1944. It began computations for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships in May and was officially presented to the university on August 7, 1944. The ASCC was built from switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. It used 765,000 components and hundreds of miles of wire, comprising a volume of 51 feet (16 m) in length, eight feet (2.4 m) in height, and two feet (~61 cm) deep. It had a weight of about 10,000 pounds (4500 kg). The basic calculating units had to be synchronized mechanically, so they were run by a 50-foot (~15.5 m) shaft driven by a five-horsepower (4 kW) electric motor. From the IBM Archives: The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard Mark I) was the first operating machine that could execute long computations automatically. A project conceived by Harvard University's Dr. Howard Aiken, the Mark I was built by IBM engineers in Endicott, N.Y. A steel frame 51 feet (16 m) long and eight feet high held the calculator, which consisted of an interlocking panel of small gears, counters, switches and control circuits, all only a few inches in depth. The ASCC used 500 miles (800 km) of wire with three million connections, 3,500 multipole relays with 35,000 contacts, 2,225 counters, 1,464 tenpole switches and tiers of 72 adding machines, each with 23 significant numbers. It was the industry's largest electromechanical calculator.[2]

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EDVAC
EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliestelectronic computers. Unlike its predecessor the ENIAC, it was binary rather thandecimal, and was a stored program computer.

Project origin and plan

ENIAC inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert proposed the EDVAC's construction in August 1944, and design work for the EDVAC commenced before the ENIAC was fully operational. The design would implement a number of important architectural and logical improvements conceived during the ENIAC's construction and would incorporate a high speed serial access memory.[1] Like the ENIAC, the EDVAC was built for the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Eckert and Mauchly and the other ENIAC designers were joined by John von Neumann in a consulting role; von Neumann summarized and discussed logical design developments in the 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.[2]

UNIVAC I
The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) was the first commercial computer produced in the United States.[1] It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was begun by their company, EckertMauchly Computer

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Corporation, and was completed after the company had been acquired byRemington Rand (which later became part of Sperry, now Unisys). In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply known as "theUNIVAC". The first UNIVAC was delivered to the United States Census Bureau on March 31, 1951, and was dedicated on June 14 that year.[2] The fifth machine (built for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission) was used by CBS to predict the result of the 1952 presidential election. With a sample of just 1% of the voting population it correctly predicted that Dwight D. Eisenhowerwould win.

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