A History of Information Technology and Systems
A. The Premechanical Age: 3000 B.C. - 1450 A.D.
- Writing and Alphabets--communication.
- First humans communicated only through speaking and picture drawings.
- 3000 B.C., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (what is today southern Iraq) devised cuniform
- Around 2000 B.C., Phoenicians created symbols
- The Greeks later adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels; the Romans gave the letters Latin names to create the alphabet we use today.
- Paper and Pens--input technologies.
- Sumerians' input technology was a stylus that could scratch marks in wet clay.
- About 2600 B.C., the Egyptians write on the papyrus plant
- around 100 A.D., the Chinese made paper from rags, on which modern-day papermaking is based.
- Books and Libraries: Permanent Storage Devices.
- Religious leaders in Mesopotamia kept the earliest "books"
- The Egyptians kept scrolls
- Around 600 B.C., the Greeks began to fold sheets of papyrus vertically into leaves and bind them together.
- The First Numbering Systems.
- Egyptian system:
- The numbers 1-9 as vertical lines, the number 10 as a U or circle, the number 100 as a coiled rope, and the number 1,000 as a lotus blossom.
- The first numbering systems similar to those in use today were invented between 100 and 200 A.D. by Hindus in India who created a nine-digit numbering system.
- Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was developed.
- Egyptian system:
- The First Calculators: The Abacus.
One of the very first information processors.
B. The Mechanical Age: 1450 - 1840
- The First Information Explosion.
- Johann Gutenberg (Mainz, Germany)
- Invented the movable metal-type printing process in 1450.
- The development of book indexes and the widespread use of page numbers.
- Johann Gutenberg (Mainz, Germany)
- The first general purpose "computers"
- Actually people who held the job title "computer: one who works with numbers."
- Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.
- Slide Rule.
Early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English clergyman, invented the slide rule - The Pascaline. Invented by Blaise Pascal (1623-62).
- Leibniz's Machine.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), German mathematician and philosopher.
The Pascaline (front)
(rear view)
Diagram of interior
The Reckoner (reconstruction)
- Slide Rule.
- Babbage's Engines
Charles Babbage (1792-1871), eccentric English mathematician
- The Difference Engine.
- The Analytical Engine.
- Augusta Ada Byron (1815-52).
- The first programmer
Joseph Marie Jacquard's loom.
C. The Electromechanical Age: 1840 - 1940.
The discovery of ways to harness electricity was the key advance made during this period. Knowledge and information could now be converted into electrical impulses.
- The Beginnings of Telecommunication.
- Voltaic Battery.
- Late 18th century.
- Telegraph.
- Early 1800s.
- Morse Code.
- Developed in1835 by Samuel Morse
- Dots and dashes.
- Telephone and Radio.
- Followed by the discovery that electrical waves travel through space and can produce an effect far from the point at which they originated.
- These two events led to the invention of the radio
- Guglielmo Marconi
- 1894
- Voltaic Battery.
- Electromechanical Computing
- Herman Hollerith and IBM.
Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) in 1880.
Census Machine.
Early punch cards.
Punch card workers.
- Herman Hollerith and IBM.
- Mark 1.
Paper tape stored data and program instructions.
D. The Electronic Age: 1940 - Present.
- First Tries.
- Early 1940s
- Electronic vacuum tubes.
- Eckert and Mauchly.
- The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes:
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC)
The ENIAC team (Feb 14, 1946). Left to right: J. Presper Eckert, Jr.; John Grist Brainerd; Sam Feltman; Herman H. Goldstine; John W. Mauchly; Harold Pender; Major General G. L. Barnes; Colonel Paul N. Gillon.
Rear view (note vacuum tubes).
- The First Stored-Program Computer(s)
- The First General-Purpose Computer for Commercial Use: Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC).
The Manchester University Mark I (prototype).
UNIVAC publicity photo.
- The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes:
- The Four Generations of Digital Computing.
- The First Generation (1951-1958).
- The Second Generation (1959-1963).
- The Third Generation (1964-1979).
- The Fourth Generation (1979- Present).
- Large-scale and very large-scale integrated circuits (LSIs and VLSICs)
- Microprocessors that contained memory, logic, and control circuits (an entire CPU = Central Processing Unit) on a single chip.
- Which allowed for home-use personal computers or PCs, like the Apple (II and Mac) and IBM PC.
- Apple II released to public in 1977, by Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs.
- Initially sold for $1,195 (without a monitor); had 16k RAM.
- First Apple Mac released in 1984.
- IBM PC introduced in 1981.
- Debuts with MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System)
- Apple II released to public in 1977, by Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs.
- Fourth generation language software products
- E.g., Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, Microsoft Word, and many others.
- Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) for PCs arrive in early 1980s
- Which allowed for home-use personal computers or PCs, like the Apple (II and Mac) and IBM PC.
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