In 1642 Pascal, the 18-year-old son of a French tax collector invented a device to help his father with his duties. The box, called a Pascaline, used 8 dials to add numbers up to 8 figures long. As one dial moved to 10 notches it moved the next dial up a notch. The disadvantage to the Pascaline was that it was limited to addition and positive numbers.

In 1694, Leibniz improved the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply. In 1820, Colmar improved the machine, the Arithometer, so it could do the four basic arithmetic functions.

The Arithometer

The true beginnings of computers as we know them today, began with an English math professor, Charles Babbage. By 1812, he noticed a harmony between machines and math. Machines were best at performing jobs repeatedly without mistake. Math often required the simple repetition of tasks. In 1822, Babbage invented the Difference Engine. It was powered by steam and was as large as a locomotive. After 10 years of work, he refined his machine into a general purpose computer called the Analytical Engine. It had over 50,000 parts. Information was put into this machine using perforated cards. Babbage borrowed the idea of punch cards from the maker of looms.

In 1889, Herman Hollerith refined Babbage’s punch card idea. The cards could now store information that could be read by other machines. He brought his idea to the business world. Both business and government used punch cards for data processing until the 1960’s.

Over the following years several scientists refined calculators to do more complex operations. By the Second World War, governments looked to develop computers to help with war time strategies. By 1941, Konrad Zuse developed the Z3 to design airplanes and missiles. In 1943, the British made a code-breaking computer called the Colossus. Yet, one year later, Howard Aiken made an all-electronic calculator for IBM in 1944. The Mark I was half as long as a football field has 500 miles of wiring. However, it was slow.

A partnership between the US government and the University of Pennsylvania produced the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). This machine had 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 5,000,000 soldered joints. It was such a large piece of machinery that it used 160 kilowatts of electric power. It was a general-purpose computer that was 1,000 times faster than the Mark I. technique as well as the "conditional control transfer," that allowed the computer to be stopped at any point and then resumed, allowed for greater versatility in computer programming. The key component to the von Neumann architecture was the central processing unit, which allowed all computer functions to be coordinated through a single source.

Picture compliments of
the Bettman Archive

In 1951, the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer), built by Remington Rand, became one of the first pioneers in commercially available computers to take advantage of these advances. Both the U.S. Census Bureau and General Electric owned UNIVACs. One of UNIVAC's notable early achievements was foretelling the winner of the 1952 presidential election, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

First generation computers were characterized by the fact that operating instructions were made-to-order for the specific task for which the computer was to be used. Each computer had a different binary-coded program called a machine language that told it how to operate. This made the computer difficult to program and limited its versatility and speed. Other distinctive features of first generation computers were the use of vacuum tubes (responsible for their breathtaking size) and magnetic drums for data storage.