History of Computing
The history of computing is much older than we might suppose. Since the dawn of time, we have been looking for ways to make certain tasks of daily life, such as calculations and accounting, faster.
Every few years we had certain technological leaps that allowed us to make those calculations more complex and faster.
How did it all start?
It is important to know the evolution to understand what brought us here, and what problems we have had to solve with computers.
Abaco — 2000AC
It was the first tool we used to solve calculations. It was the first tool we used to solve calculations, and everyday things.
More complex machines — 1600’s
Eventually, machines were created that were more complex to operate compared to the abacus, but that help us to solve some more advanced calculations and mathematics.
Human Computers — 1600’s
One of the first times the term computer was used was by people whose job was to perform calculations and solve mathematics. This was not scalable, as we needed to get results quickly, and without errors.
Pre-computation table — 1700’s
To help human computers, books were made that included pre-made calculations to facilitate the results and eliminate some of the bugs that human computers had.
Calculation machines — 1940’s
Human computers were not enough, so we created machines that were capable of making more complex and faster calculations, giving ballistic results more efficiently. Fun fact: These machines were mainly operated by women.
Punch Cards — 1960´s
Punch cards came to help us save data, so we didn’t have to redo our calculations from scratch every time we had to solve a new problem. These cards stored information in each punched hole.
This tool had its limitations, being that each card equals one line of code. Also, the problem was that we did not know if there was any error in our program since sometimes we drilled a hole in parts where we should not do it.
Machine Code — 1960’s
It was the first time that we used 1s and 0s which is the language of computers to be able to perform calculations that we programmed. This also had a lot of complexity, but it helped us to optimize many processes.
First programming languages — 1970’s
Because learning Machine Code was very complex, programming languages were created, which allowed us to give instructions to the computer in a simpler way so that a human could read and write these instructions.
These languages are based on machine code since what they do is compile to make the machine understand what you write as 1s and 0s.
