The Computer Corner

By Charles Miller, Jan 19, 2007

What’s in a name?

My friend Michael recently got into an on-line tit-for-tat when he said he had worked with computers since the 1950s, to which someone answered that the PC did not exist prior to 1982. Nobody wins this argument because the dictionary does not provide a definitive definition for the word “computer.”

An ancient Greek computer called the Antikythera mechanism is a geared device discovered in 1900 and dated to approximately 80 BCE. Its remarkable miniaturization and complexity intrigued historians of science and technology since its discovery. Many believe the Antikythera mechanism was used to compute positions of the sun and moon, but after spending a millennium underwater in the Aegean Sea, it does not work now.

At one time, “computer” was a job description for the people that banks and other institutions hired to add up large columns of numbers in their heads. By the 18th century, large numbers of computers were required to calculate such numerical tables as tides, celestial events and so forth.

Enter Charles Babbage, an English inventor who saw the high error rate of the people computing the tables and made it his life’s work to remove human error and calculate the tables mechanically.

In 1822, he designed the “difference engine,” a 15-ton mechanical behemoth of 25,000 metal parts which he failed to complete before starting on the new and improved Difference Engine version 2. That delivery schedule is still used in the computer industry today.

Babbage was aided in his work by Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Trained as a mathematician, she was one of the few who totally understood Babbage’s work, to the point that she wrote a program to run on a computer that did not yet exist. For this, Ada is now credited as being the very first computer programmer.

Poor Ada went completely insane, spending time in a mattress-lined room to prevent her banging her head on the walls. Anyone who has written computer software can empathize with that!

Though he did stay busy with other successful inventions, such as the locomotive cowcatcher, none of Babbage’s computers were ever completed before his death in 1871. More than a century later, in 1991, the difference engine in the London Science Museum was finished according to Babbage’s plans, and it does work.

During the same period in the 19th century, the textile industry was using the Jacquard loom, a machine capable of memorizing and weaving incredibly complex fabric designs. Data were recorded on punch cards.

Enter Herman Hollerith, a special agent of the US Census Bureau whose brother-in-law was in the silk-weaving business. The Census Bureau had a huge problem on the horizon because it had taken seven years to count all the census forms from 1880, and they feared it would take 12 years to count the next one in 1890.

Hollerith had seen railroad conductors record passenger identification details (such as height and hair color) by punching around the edge of the ticket. He decided that a census taker could do the same and the resulting punch card could be counted and sorted by a new machine based on the Jacquard loom.

He built his machines under contract for the Census Bureau, and they tabulated the 1890 census in only 2½ years. Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of the three corporations later merged to form IBM.

As they say, the rest is history.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com