Who Invented the Computer?
March 21, 2011
Unlike today's children, children of
my generation didn't have many possessions. This was not merely because money was in short supply. Before the
electronic age, there just weren't that many unique items to buy. Today, if you take an inventory of a child's possessions, you'll find that nearly everything is electronic, and quite expensive. There are
cellphones,
music players,
video players and
televisions,
video games,
computers, talking
dolls and talking
action figures.
One of my prized possessions as a child was a
pencil box. This wasn't an ordinary pencil box. Built into its sliding door was a
mechanical calculator consisting of a row of
gear-like wheels. By using a pencil point to rotate these wheels, you could add and subtract very large numbers. Large number arithmetic was still a difficult process for a young child to do. It was magic. As
Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As a child, I didn't realize that this "advanced technology" was actually 300 years old.
The
polymath,
Blaise Pascal, whose name is immortalized as a
computer language, invented this mechanical calculator in 1642. This calculator, now called
Pascal's calculator, or the Pascaline, allowed the mechanical addition and subtraction of numbers. Of course, it could also multiply numbers by repeated additions. It actually
did the calculation, unlike the millennia old
abacus, which acts more as a memory aid. Was the Pascaline the first computer? Maybe.
Dictionary entry for abacus.
Via Wikimedia Commons
As an extension of the Pascaline,
Gottfried Leibniz produced the
Leibniz wheels that added multiplication and division operations. Mechanical calculators that allowed all four of the basic mathematical functions had continued improvements that continued to the introduction of the
Comptometer in 1887 and its improvements through most of the
twentieth century. Are any of these the first computer? Maybe.
The
Jacquard loom was a
process controller used for the manufacture of complex
textile weaves. It used
punched cards as a memory element, but it didn't manipulate the data on the cards. It just passed the data through to the weaving elements. Was this the first computer? Probably not.
The
mathematician,
William Oughtred, invented the
slide rule in 1622. As its history reveals, this
analogue computer helped to put men on the
Moon. I've called the slide rule an analogue computer, and it predates Pascal's calculator. Was the slide rule the first analog computer; and, perhaps, the first computer? Well...?
In 1927,
Vannevar Bush built a mechanical analogue computer called the
Differential Analyzer at
MIT. This machine could solve
differential equations with eighteen
independent variables. If you argue that the slide rule is not really a computer, your arguments are fairly limp when weighed against the Differential Analyzer. Was this, then, the first computer? Well...?
The
German engineer,
Konrad Zuse, built a "
Turing-complete" programmable computer, the
Z3, in 1941. Zuse also created the first
high-level programming language,
Plankalkül, in 1946. Zuse had purposely discounted the use of
vacuum tubes as switches, probably because of cost and reliability issues. The Z3 was
electromechanical, using
telephone relays, but it could do 22-bit
floating-point arithmetic, could loop (although not
conditionally), it had memory, and it used what's now called the "
von Neumann architecture" that stores both programs and data in memory. Now, that's a computer! Was it the first...?
How could we have a discussion like this without mentioning
Charles Babbage, who designed, but did not build, a decimal, programmable, mechanical computer in the mid-
nineteenth century? Or the vacuum tube
Colossus computer built by
Alan Turing and his colleagues with the sole purpose of
code-breaking during
World War II? The first wasn't built, but quite a few
Nobel Prizes have been awarded for theory, not experiment. The second used vacuum tubes, so it was electronic as well as digital, but it wasn't general-purpose.
The
ENIAC was a vacuum tube computer considered to be the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was programmable, Turing-complete, and a thousand times faster than electromechanical computers. It was designed and patented (US Patent No. 3,120,606, 1964) by
John Mauchly and
J. Presper Eckert of the
University of Pennsylvania. So, in ENIAC we have the "first computer." Not really. The ENIAC patent was declared
invalid in 1973, and its subject matter entered the
public domain. The reason for this, as decided in
court, was that
John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor at
Iowa State University, had actually invented "the automatic electronic computer."
Atanasoff and a graduate student,
Clifford Berry, built what's now called the
Atanasoff-Berry_Computer (ABC) from 1937-1942. The machine contained 280 dual-
triode vacuum tubes, but it was not programmable. Its only function was to solve
systems of linear equations. The
ABC was not a Turing complete computer, and it was not a stored program computer. It did use
binary digits. A recent biography of Atanasoff supports the claim that he's the inventor of the electronic digital computer.[1-2]
The answer to the question, "Who Invented the Computer?" depends on what you define as a "computer." As you can see, there are many different types of computers. There are analogue, digital, mechanical, electromechanical, electronic and combinations thereof. As if this question doesn't generate enough controversy, what was the first
personal computer? The
TX-0, perhaps?
References:
- John Gilbey, "Biography: The ABC of computing," Nature, vol. 468, no. 7325 (December 9, 2010), pp. 760-761.
- Jane Smiley, "The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer," Doubleday (October 19, 2010), 256 Pages (via Amazon).
- George Dyson, "The Birth of the Computer," TED 2003 Conference Video (March, 2003).
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