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Herman Hollerith

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Tabulating Machine

1890

The tabulating machine was an electromechanical machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on punched cards. In its basic form, a tabulating machine would read one card at a time, print portions (fields) of the card on fan-fold paper, possibly rearranged, and add one or more numbers punched on the card to one or more counters, called accumulators. On early models, the accumulator register dials would be read manually after a card run to get totals. Later models could print totals directly. Cards with a particular punch could be treated as master cards causing different behavior. For example, customer master cards could be merged with sorted cards recording individual items purchased. When read by the tabulating machine to create invoices, the billing address and customer number would be printed from the master card, and then individual items purchased and their price would be printed. When the next master card was detected, the total price would be printed from the accumulator and the page ejected to the top of the next page, typically using a carriage control tape. With successive stages or cycles of punched-card processing, fairly complex calculations could be made if one had a sufficient set of equipment. (In modern data processing terms, one can think of each stage as an SQL clause: SELECT (filter columns), then WHERE (filter cards, or "rows"), then maybe a GROUP BY for totals and counts, then a SORT BY; and then perhaps feed those back to another set of SELECT and WHERE cycles again if needed.) A human operator had to retrieve, load, and store the various card decks at each stage. His designs won the competition for the 1890 US census, chosen for their ability to count combined facts. These machines reduced a ten-year job to three months ( some sources give different numbers, ranging from six weeks to three years), saved the 1890 taxpayers five million dollars, and earned him an 1890 Columbia PhD¹. This was the first wholly successful information processing system to replace pen and paper. Hollerith's machines were also used for censuses in Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and again in the US census of 1900. Sources: Wikipedia, Columbia University

Herman Hollerith is widely regarded as the father of modern automatic computation. He chose the punched card as the basis for storing and processing information and he built the first punched-card tabulating and sorting machines as well as the first key punch, and he founded the company that was to become IBM. Hollerith's designs dominated the computing landscape for almost 100 years. After receiving his Engineer of Mines (EM) degree at age 19, Hollerith worked on the 1880 US census, a laborious and error-prone operation that cried out for mechanization. After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards (pioneered in the Jacquard Loom to record information, and designed special equipment -- a tabulator and sorter-- to tally the results. Hollerith's contributions to modern computing are... "incalculable" :-) He did not stop at his original 1890 tabulating machine and sorter, but produced many other innovative new models. He also invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism the first key punch, and took what was perhaps the first step toward programming by introducing a wiring panel in his 1906 Type-I Tabulator, allowing it to do different jobs without having to be rebuilt! (The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards.) These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry. Sources: Columbia University

Herman Hollerith didn't invent the punch card reader (remember Jacquard's Loom) but he created a system that could store more information on a single card and read more information at one time. The card reader processed the punch cards by pushing pins through holes in the card to enter cups of mercury beneath. When the pins contacted the mercury, an electrical circuit was completed which then advanced a dial on the tabulator. Different points of pin/mercury alignment could be assigned to different dials/registers which allowed for simultaneous tabulation of different fields of information. The punch cards were divided into sections to record the number of people in each household, how many were employed, their national origin, and other details. The cards were roughly the size of paper money in circulation at that time which allowed him to use existing currency drawers, bins, and boxes to organize the 60 million census cards. Sources: computerhistory.org, Hines Nixdorf Museums Forum

Alan Turing

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Bombe Computer

1939

Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic. Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts. He accepted hormone treatment with DES, a procedure commonly referred to as chemical castration, as an alternative to prison. Turing died on 7 June 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. Following a public campaign in 2009, the British prime minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way [Turing] was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous pardon in 2013. The term "Alan Turing law" is now used informally to refer to a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. Source: wikipedia

The bombe was an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, albeit engineered differently both from each other and from Polish and British bombes. The British bombe was developed from a device known as the "bomba" (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna), which had been designed in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, who had been breaking German Enigma messages for the previous seven years, using it and earlier machines. The initial design of the British bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing,[4] with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. The first bombe, code-named Victory, was installed in March 1940 while the second version, Agnus Dei or Agnes, incorporating Welchman's new design, was working by August 1940. The bombe was designed to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German military networks: specifically, the set of rotors in use and their positions in the machine; the rotor core start positions for the message—the message key—and one of the wirings of the plugboard. Source: wikipedia

Harvard Mark I

1944

The Mark I computer, built at Harvard University in 1944, is one of the early landmarks of computer technology. The computer was the brainchild of Howard Aiken, a Harvard graduate student (PhD, 1939) and then instructor, and was based on mechanical, punch-card tabulating equipment developed by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). The Mark I had 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal digits long. It could do 3 additions or subtractions in one second. Multiplication took 6 seconds, division took 15 seconds, and a logarithmic or trigonometric function took over one minute. Mark I worked around the clock on military projects, calculating massive mathematical tables. Principally, it helped the Navy by computing tables for the design of equipment such as torpedos and underwater detection systems. Other branches of the military sought its help in calculating the design of surveillance camera lenses, radar, and implosion devices for the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project. Check out the link below for a tour of the Mark I. Harvard Mark I Sources: ethw.org/Harvard_Mark_I, wikipedia, chsi.harvard.edu

The Harvard Mark I was a mammoth computer with a very large amount of electrical complexity. It took a team of workers to operate and maintain it. The computer was over 50 feet long, weighed approximately 5 tons (10,000 pounds), had 31 relays, used 500 miles of wiring, and consisted of about 750,000 separate parts. Check out this website for more details about what is in the Mark I. Source: sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk What is inside Harvard Mark I

Konrad Zuse

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Z3

1941

Konrad Zuse was a german engineer and computer pioneer. Zuse is credited with building the first binary computer. His first computer, the Z1, built in 1938 was not successful. However, he kept going and, in 1941, completed his Z3 computer. The Z3 was the first operational program-controlled computer and was in use in Germany helping to solve aerospace engineering problems. As well has his computers, Zuse is said to have created the first programming language in 1945. Sources: mathhistory.st-andrews.ac.uk

The electronics of the time were not sophisticated, the Z3 relied mostly on relays and the whole machine ran at a little over 5 hertz (no, not megahertz.. just 5 cycles per second). It weighed a ton and drew 4000 watts of power, but it was actually remarkably capable. Floating point numbers were supported, the Z3 could not only add and subtract, but divide, multiply and calculated the square root. Many of the computer’s operations were actually implemented in microcode rather than being hard-wired. A keyboard and row of lights formed the basis of the operator console, and the Z3 could store data on punched celluloid tape. Thankfully, the Nazi government showed only limited interest in Zuse's computers as they were not convinced of its value. They never discovered the full potential of the computer and, in a 1943 bombing raid, the Z3 was destroyed. Zuse went on to design the next generation Z4 computer, but it was not completed until after the war.Meanwhile the English were using the Colossus computer and the Bombe Computers to decipher German codes. Source: retromobe.com

1940s - 1950s

ENIAC1945

EDVAC1949

UNIVAC1951

In 1942, physicist John Mauchly proposed an all-electronic calculating machine. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, needed to calculate complex wartime ballistics tables. Proposal met patron. The result was ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), built between 1943 and 1945—the first large-scale computer to run at electronic speed without being slowed by any mechanical parts. For a decade, until a 1955 lightning strike, ENIAC may have run more calculations than all mankind had done up to that point. Source: computerhistory.org

The Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) was one of the earliest large mainframe computers to be built in the 1940s. It was the first mainframe computer that represented binary systems rather than decimal systems. Although previous computers could shift from one sort of job to another if given new instructions, this was a tedious process that might involve adjusting hundreds of controls or unplugging and replugging a forest of wires. EDVAC, by contrast, was designed to receive its instructions electronically; moreover, the program, coded in zeros and ones, would be kept in the same place that held the numbers the computer would be processing. This approach—letting a program treat its own instructions as data—offered huge advantages. It would accelerate the work of the computer, simplify its circuitry, and make possible much more ambitious programming. The stored-program idea spread rapidly, gaining impetus from a lucid description by one of the most famous mathematicians in the world, John von Neumann, who had taken an interest in EDVAC. Sources: Techopedia, greatachievements.org

Computing burst into popular culture with UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), arguably the first computer to become a household name. A versatile, general-purpose machine, UNIVAC was the brainchild of John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, creators of ENIAC. They proposed a statistical tabulator to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1946, and in 1951 UNIVAC I passed Census Bureau tests. Within six years, 46 of the million-dollar UNIVAC systems had been installed—with the last operating until 1970. Source: computerhistory.org