Computing History Flashcards
computers and the British Empire, Charles Babbage and the Difference Engine
Charles Babbage unveils his design for a machine he called the Difference Engine, the first example of a mechanical computing machine. The British government funded the building of a Difference Engine, which Babbage never actually completed.
tabulate polynomial functions.
MATH
World War II, Enigma codes and Alan Turing, the Lorenz Cipher and Tommy Flowers, Colossus
Flowers was first brought into the codebreaking world to work on Alan Turing’s Bombe, a system designed to break Enigma codes. A more complicated cipher, Lorenz, required a new system to crack. In order to break it, Flowers proposed the design for the machine that would become known as Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer.
Xerox and personal computers, artificial intelligence, computer dependence and an EMP
notably being the first to manufacture xerographic plain-paper copiers. Headquarters are in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Electro magnetic pluse
Ada Lovelace and programming, subroutines and looping
she outlined several computing concepts such as the “loop” (a group of instructions that are executed multiple times) and the “subroutine” (a segment of a program that can be invoked at any time).Although it cannot be said that Ada formulated the first computer program in history (Babbage had already done this previously), she was the first to publish one.
the US census and Herman Hollerith
In 1881, Herman Hollerith began designing a machine to tabulate census data more efficiently than by traditional hand methods. The U.S. Census Bureau had taken eight years to complete the 1880 census, and it was feared that the 1890 census would take even longer. Hollerith invented and used a punched card device to help analyze the 1890 U.S. census data. His great breakthrough was his use of electricity to read, count and sort punched cards whose holes represented data gathered by the census-takers.
John von Neumann and the stored-program computer
The von Neumann architecture is a design model for a stored-program digital computer that uses a processing unit and a single separate storage structure to hold both instructions and data. It is named after the mathematician and early computer scientist John von Neumann.
Grace Hopper, the compiler, and machine code
She believed that a programming language based on English was possible. Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers. By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker (originally called a compiler), which was written for the A-0 System.
Dennis Ritchie, the UNIX operating system, and the C programming language
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – c. October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. He is most well-known for creating the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language.
Robert Noyce and Marcian Hoff, the microchip, and Intel
Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 – June 3, 1990), nicknamed “the Mayor of Silicon Valley”, was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited with the realization of the first monolithic integrated circuit or microchip, which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name.
Steve Jobs, Apple, and the mouse-driven GUI
Graphical user interface
Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Windows
He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen.
