computers we use them every single day
throughout almost every moment of our
day whether we're sitting in front of
them at work staring at boring
spreadsheets or browsing reddit on the
little computer that we call a
smartphone they permeate our entire
lives when most people think of the
origin of computers they imagine a giant
room sized machine like the IBM Harvard
Mark one from the 1940s and they're
right the computers are old older even
than they may imagine defining computers
can be tricky at one point it was a job
description now it describes a device
that helps people do everything from
traditional number computation to liking
cat pics on social media so it may be
best to go back to the origin of why we
wanted help computing numbers before we
get to how we ended up with websites
like Twitter and reddit I'm Daniel Seehausen
and this is the answer archive so
let's start from the beginning the very
beginning prior to written history
people were already documenting numbers
in clever ways through carving little
notches into bones and sticks
numbers could be stored to be retrieved
later via Shango bone is one of the
oldest known tools of this sort dating
to as far back as 20,000 BC these
devices were known as tally sticks and
they lasted for a long time the British
government only decided that the system
of storing tally sticks to reflect
contracts was out-of-date in 1826 after
having been used since the Middle Ages
the sticks were split in half and the
bank recording the ownership kept one
side called the foil and the individual
who owned a share in the company kept
the other side called the stock and that
is where we get the term stock market
unfortunately during the dismantling of
this tally stick system when the sticks
were being burned the inferno got out of
control and they took the House of
Commons and the House of Lords with them
around the same time that tally sticks
were falling out of favour the amount of
information in the world was increasing
for example in 1766 the British Royal
Observatory commissioned computers of
the human sort around the country to
produce a nautical Almanac that would
help sailors navigate safely most of
these computers were former clerks or
clergy that worked from home on creating
tables of data that would eventually end
up in the Almanac while work of this
sort was becoming more frequent in
Britain across the channel France was
stirring
some political and data processing
revolutions after the French Revolution
the brand-new government decided to
shake up both the system of property
taxation and the entire system of
weights and measures simultaneously they
charged a man named Gaspard de prony
with creating an accurate land survey of
France and with unifying all the
measurements into the new metric system
this project would soon become the
largest data processing and collection
endeavor the world had yet known
luckily de prony had an idea that would
make the project more manageable while
considering Adam Smith's Wealth of
Nations which describes manufacturing
hens more effectively through the
division of labour de prony conceived
all of a sudden the idea of applying the
same method to the immense work with
which he had been burdened and to
manufacture logarithms as one
manufactures pens Gaspard de prony went
on to organize a computational Factory
in tears with mathematicians at the top
working the theory all the way down to
around 70 human computers doing basic
difference operations these computers
were mostly former hairdressers who lost
their jobs when fancy French hairstyles
died in popular fashion because some
very fancy French people died in a
popular fashion this method produced
tables far more quickly than the
freelance style of the nautical Almanac
but unfortunately it didn't become
widespread in his era in part because
the tables were never published
due to economic instability in the
French Republic however Gaspard de prony
's legacy lives on and his name is one
of the 72 enshrined on the eiffel tower
for his contributions to science and
engineering Gaspard de Peyronie's work
would go on to influence the history of
computing more dramatically though when
a young mathematician and economist
named Charles Babbage visited France in
the 1810s there he learned of two Pro
knees work Babbage had some experience
producing tables similar to de prony he
worked on star tables for the
astronomical society with his friend
John Herschel son of the famous
astronomer William Herschel who
discovered Uranus these star tables were
calculated by freelancers just like the
nautical Almanac Babbage and Herschel
oversaw the project and checked the
tables for errors
around this time Babbage started
conceiving of a mechanical solution to
the tedium of all this computational
work saying I wish to god these
calculations had been executed by steam
in an open letter to the president of
the Royal Society
Babbage described the pony's work in
detail and outlined how a device he was
working on could speed up the process of
table making and improve accuracy this
proposed device was called the
difference engine and it would go on to
dominate the next decade of Babbage's
life
Babbage worked tirelessly on version
after version of his Difference Engine
partially with funding from the British
government and partially with his own
money when finished the engine was
supposed to automate the work of the
lowest-level computers and do it even
faster than they could it also would
have printed these tables and eliminated
some of the large number of errors that
were introduced during the printing
process in 1832 Babbage finally managed
to complete a small functioning portion
of his engine which proved without a
doubt that the concept was achievable
Babbage kept this part in his home as a
novelty to spark conversation among his
guests
despite his hopes one of the only
visitors who showed continued interest
was a young woman named ADA Byron
daughter of the eccentric poet Lord
Byron she became a dear friend to
Babbage and he mentored her in
mathematics science and engineering
unfortunately at this point a tide of
issues swept over the project from
Babbage losing his main engineer wilde
mismanagement of costs to a changing of
the guard in upper levels of government
these issues ultimately drowned the
project with the final nails in the
coffin being Babbage discussing a
substantial redesign of the engine and
simultaneously promoting a new project
that he was thinking up that could do
far more than the difference engine he
called it the analytical engine
Babbage raising the prospect of another
engine while failing to complete the
first caused the government to lose
faith in Him after this he didn't
receive any more government funding for
his projects in 1991 the London Science
Museum finally took Babbage's plans for
the redesigned difference engine and
brought them into existence the engine
worked with only a few small changes
Charles Babbage would eventually go down
in history as the father of computing
but it wasn't because of the difference
engine which he got very close to
completing it was for the analytical
engine which he only managed to
construct a small part of before his
death in 1871 the analytical engine that
Babbage conceived of was a mammoth
undertaking and was a precursor to the
digital computers we have today for the
next decade
Babbage focused on the design of his new
engine but his concentration was
frequently disturbed by loud music
outside his London home in frustration
he lobbied to make Street music illegal
one quote from the 25 full pages of his
autobiography dedicated to the subject
puts it well I have obtained in my own
country in unenviable celebrity not by
anything I've done but simply by a
determined resistance to the tyranny of
the lowest mom whose love not of music
but of the most discordant noises
is so great that it insists upon
enjoying it at all hours and in every
street this fame may have backfired on
him as street musicians began harassing
him regardless he did make great
progress on designing his analytical
engine which shared many of the
principles of modern computers if it had
been built it would have had a control
barrel analogous to today's CPUs a mill
similar to an arithmetic logic unit and
a store that would hold data in memory
similar to RAM it was even programmable
with punched cards that had been
invented to weave patterns and
tapestries in a machine called the
jacquard loom after years of work
Babbage was invited to give a
presentation on the analytical engine in
Italy this visit culminated in an
audience with the Sardinian king himself
this was such a high point in Babbage's
life that he dedicated his autobiography
to
saying to the king your father I am
indebted for the first public and
official acknowledgement of this
invention I am happy in thus expressing
my deep sense of that obligation to his
son the sovereign of United Italy the
country of Archimedes and of Galileo
during this visit to Italy
Babbage asked an Italian mathematician
to write an account of his analytical
engine a few years later the
mathematician published it in French
back in England ADA Byron who had since
married and become Countess Lovelace
decided to translate this article into
English
Babbage persuaded her to add some notes
of her own she did so and in fact more
than tripled the length of the original
account her poetic writing helped people
understand the power and beauty of the
analytical engine in a way that Babbage
had difficulty expressing one memorable
passage says we may say most athelete
that the analytical engine weaves
algebraically
just as the jacquard loom weaves flowers
and leaves
Babbage so deeply appreciated ADA
Lovelace's work that he called her his
dear and much admired interpreter for
her contributions to the beginnings of
computer science Ada Lovelace was
honored by having the programming
language ADA named after her after his
failure to receive any funding for the
analytical engine in the 1840s Babbage
took a ten-year break from working on it
and he pursued other projects but in
1856
he returned to working on his engine and
became a bit of a recluse and he filled
notebooks with thoughts on his designs
when Babbage lay on his deathbed in 1871
having never built more than a small
portion of his engine the street
musicians came back for a little revenge
and had children whacked in pails
outside his bedroom window as he lay
dying 35 years after Charles Babbage
died his son paid the r:w Munro company
to manufacture the mill portion of his
father's designs it successfully printed
the first 25 multiples of Pi
Charles Babbage was the first in a long
line of computing pioneers that would
put smartphones in our pockets and PCs
on all our desks he laid the groundwork
on the design that computers use even
today though he was far ahead of his
time and died not realizing his vision
Babbage was crucial for getting the ball
rolling on digital computers and over a
hundred years later he would inspire
future engineers to develop better
versions of his analytical engine that
would help put men on the moon and cat
pictures in our faces
one such engineer studying for a PhD at
Harvard in 1936 Howard Aiken began to
conceive of a digital calculator when he
pitched it to the faculty there it was
met with limited enthusiasm if not
downright antagonism one of the texts
approach taken and said he couldn't see
why in the world I wanted to do anything
like this because we already had such a
machine and nobody ever used it when
pressed the tech took him to the Attic
and showed him a set of calculating
wheels on wooden frames the remains of
Charles Babbage's engines donated to
Harvard by his son Aiken was enthralled
and he began furiously studying
Babbage's life and work while reading
Babbage's autobiography Aiken came
across this passage if unwarned by my
example any man shall undertake and
shall succeed in really constructing an
engine upon different principles or by
simpler mechanical means I have no fear
of leaving my reputation and his charge
for he alone will be fully able to
appreciate the nature of my efforts and
the value of their results he said he
felt that Babbage was addressing him
personally from the past Aiken decided
to make a proposal to IBM
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