Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

History of Computer abacus invented in ancient China Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) ! Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician Pascal’s calculators ran with gears and wheels Pascal Calculator Charles Babbage (1791-1871) Charles Babbage was an English mathematician. Considered a “father of the computer” He invented computers but failed to build them. The ﬁrst complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Babbage Engine Alan Turing (1912-1954) Alan Turing was a British computer scientist. ! He proposed the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine in 1936 , which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Alan Turing (1912-1954) During the second World War, Turing worked for Britain’s code breaking centre. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers. Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts. He accepted treatment with estrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. Grace Hopper (1906–1992) Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United ! States Navy rear admiral. She created a compiler system that translated mathematical code into machine language. Later, the compiler became the forerunner to modern programming languages Grace Hopper (1906–1992) In 1947, Hopper and her assistants were working on the "granddaddy" of modern computers, the Harvard Mark II. "Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass- enclosed computer," she said. Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary The bug is so famous, tweezers, removed the problem, a you can actually see two- inch moth. From then on, him/her in the when anything went wrong with a Smithsonian computer, we said it had bugs in it.” Museum. Harvard Mark II Grace Hopper Nanosecond ! A Grace Hopper nanosecond is a visual aid that represents how fast electricity can travel in one billionth of a second. The name comes from the foot-long lengths of telephone wire that Admiral Grace Hopper used to give out at lectures. Admiral Hopper used the wires to illustrate how in one billionth of second (a nanosecond ) an electronic signal can travel almost twelve inches. .

Copy Link

Recommended publications

Edsger Dijkstra: the Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
INFERENCE / Vol. 5, No. 3 Edsger Dijkstra The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders Krzysztof Apt s it turned out, the train I had taken from dsger dijkstra was born in Rotterdam in 1930. Nijmegen to Eindhoven arrived late. To make He described his father, at one time the president matters worse, I was then unable to find the right of the Dutch Chemical Society, as “an excellent Aoffice in the university building. When I eventually arrived Echemist,” and his mother as “a brilliant mathematician for my appointment, I was more than half an hour behind who had no job.”1 In 1948, Dijkstra achieved remarkable schedule. The professor completely ignored my profuse results when he completed secondary school at the famous apologies and proceeded to take a full hour for the meet- Erasmiaans Gymnasium in Rotterdam. His school diploma ing. It was the first time I met Edsger Wybe Dijkstra. shows that he earned the highest possible grade in no less At the time of our meeting in 1975, Dijkstra was 45 than six out of thirteen subjects. He then enrolled at the years old. The most prestigious award in computer sci- University of Leiden to study physics. ence, the ACM Turing Award, had been conferred on In September 1951, Dijkstra’s father suggested he attend him three years earlier. Almost twenty years his junior, I a three-week course on programming in Cambridge. It knew very little about the field—I had only learned what turned out to be an idea with far-reaching consequences. a flowchart was a couple of weeks earlier.
[Show full text]
The Turing Approach Vs. Lovelace Approach
Connecting the Humanities and the Sciences: Part 2. Two Schools of Thought: The Turing Approach vs. The Lovelace Approach* Walter Isaacson, The Jefferson Lecture, National Endowment for the Humanities, May 12, 2014 That brings us to another historical figure, not nearly as famous, but perhaps she should be: Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace, often credited with being, in the 1840s, the first computer programmer. The only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, Ada inherited her father’s romantic spirit, a trait that her mother tried to temper by having her tutored in math, as if it were an antidote to poetic imagination. When Ada, at age five, showed a preference for geography, Lady Byron ordered that the subject be replaced by additional arithmetic lessons, and her governess soon proudly reported, “she adds up sums of five or six rows of figures with accuracy.” Despite these efforts, Ada developed some of her father’s propensities. She had an affair as a young teenager with one of her tutors, and when they were caught and the tutor banished, Ada tried to run away from home to be with him. She was a romantic as well as a rationalist. The resulting combination produced in Ada a love for what she took to calling “poetical science,” which linked her rebellious imagination to an enchantment with numbers. For many people, including her father, the rarefied sensibilities of the Romantic Era clashed with the technological excitement of the Industrial Revolution. Lord Byron was a Luddite. Seriously. In his maiden and only speech to the House of Lords, he defended the followers of Nedd Ludd who were rampaging against mechanical weaving machines that were putting artisans out of work.
[Show full text]
CODEBREAKING Suggested Reading List (Can Also Be Viewed Online at Good Reads)
MARSHALL LEGACY SERIES: CODEBREAKING Suggested Reading List (Can also be viewed online at Good Reads) NON-FICTION • Aldrich, Richard. Intelligence and the War against Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. • Allen, Robert. The Cryptogram Challenge: Over 150 Codes to Crack and Ciphers to Break. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2005 • Briggs, Asa. Secret Days Code-breaking in Bletchley Park. Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2011 • Budiansky, Stephen. Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War Two. New York: Free Press, 2000. • Churchhouse, Robert. Codes and Ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. • Clark, Ronald W. The Man Who Broke Purple. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977. • Drea, Edward J. MacArthur's Ultra: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan, 1942-1945. Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1992. • Fisher-Alaniz, Karen. Breaking the Code: A Father's Secret, a Daughter's Journey, and the Question That Changed Everything. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2011. • Friedman, William and Elizebeth Friedman. The Shakespearian Ciphers Examined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957. • Gannon, James. Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies and Codebreakers Helped Shape the Twentieth century. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2001. • Garrett, Paul. Making, Breaking Codes: Introduction to Cryptology. London: Pearson, 2000. • Hinsley, F. H. and Alan Stripp. Codebreakers: the inside story of Bletchley Park. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. • Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Walker and Company, 2000. • Kahn, David. Seizing The Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-boat Codes, 1939-1943. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2001. • Kahn, David. The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet.
[Show full text]
An Early Program Proof by Alan Turing F
An Early Program Proof by Alan Turing F. L. MORRIS AND C. B. JONES The paper reproduces, with typographical corrections and comments, a 7 949 paper by Alan Turing that foreshadows much subsequent work in program proving. Categories and Subject Descriptors: 0.2.4 [Software Engineeringj- correctness proofs; F.3.1 [Logics and Meanings of Programs]-assertions; K.2 [History of Computing]-software General Terms: Verification Additional Key Words and Phrases: A. M. Turing Introduction The standard references for work on program proofs b) have been omitted in the commentary, and ten attribute the early statement of direction to John other identifiers are written incorrectly. It would ap- McCarthy (e.g., McCarthy 1963); the first workable pear to be worth correcting these errors and com- methods to Peter Naur (1966) and Robert Floyd menting on the proof from the viewpoint of subse- (1967); and the provision of more formal systems to quent work on program proofs. C. A. R. Hoare (1969) and Edsger Dijkstra (1976). The Turing delivered this paper in June 1949, at the early papers of some of the computing pioneers, how- inaugural conference of the EDSAC, the computer at ever, show an awareness of the need for proofs of Cambridge University built under the direction of program correctness and even present workable meth- Maurice V. Wilkes. Turing had been writing programs ods (e.g., Goldstine and von Neumann 1947; Turing for an electronic computer since the end of 1945-at 1949). first for the proposed ACE, the computer project at the The 1949 paper by Alan M.
[Show full text]
Turing's Influence on Programming — Book Extract from “The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra”
Turing's Influence on Programming | Book extract from \The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra" Edgar G. Daylight∗ Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands [email protected] Abstract Turing's involvement with computer building was popularized in the 1970s and later. Most notable are the books by Brian Randell (1973), Andrew Hodges (1983), and Martin Davis (2000). A central question is whether John von Neumann was influenced by Turing's 1936 paper when he helped build the EDVAC machine, even though he never cited Turing's work. This question remains unsettled up till this day. As remarked by Charles Petzold, one standard history barely mentions Turing, while the other, written by a logician, makes Turing a key player. Contrast these observations then with the fact that Turing's 1936 paper was cited and heavily discussed in 1959 among computer programmers. In 1966, the first Turing award was given to a programmer, not a computer builder, as were several subsequent Turing awards. An historical investigation of Turing's influence on computing, presented here, shows that Turing's 1936 notion of universality became increasingly relevant among programmers during the 1950s. The central thesis of this paper states that Turing's in- fluence was felt more in programming after his death than in computer building during the 1940s. 1 Introduction Many people today are led to believe that Turing is the father of the computer, the father of our digital society, as also the following praise for Martin Davis's bestseller The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing1 suggests: At last, a book about the origin of the computer that goes to the heart of the story: the human struggle for logic and truth.
[Show full text]
Alan Turing, Marshall Hall, and the Alignment of WW2 Japanese Naval Intercepts
Alan Turing, Marshall Hall, and the Alignment of WW2 Japanese Naval Intercepts Peter W. Donovan arshall Hall Jr. (1910–1990) is de- The statistician Edward Simpson led the JN-25 servedly well remembered for his team (“party”) at Bletchley Park from 1943 to 1945. role in constructing the simple group His now declassified general history [12] of this of order 604800 = 27 × 33 × 52 × 7 activity noted that, in November 1943: Mas well as numerous advances in [CDR Howard Engstrom, U.S.N.] gave us combinatorics. A brief autobiography is on pages the first news we had heard of a method 367–374 of Duran, Askey, and Merzbach [5]. Hall of testing the correctness of the relative notes that Howard Engstrom (1902–1962) gave setting of two messages using only the him much help with his Ph.D. thesis at Yale in property of divisibility by three of the code 1934–1936 and later urged him to work in Naval In- groups [5-groups is the usage of this paper]. telligence (actually in the foreign communications The method was known as Hall’s weights unit Op-20-G). and was a useful insurance policy just in I was in a research division and got to see case JN-25 ever became more difficult. He work in all areas, from the Japanese codes promised to send us a write-up of it. to the German Enigma machine which Alan The JN-25 series of ciphers, used by the Japanese Turing had begun to attack in England. I Navy (I.J.N.) from 1939 to 1945, was the most made significant results on both of these important source of communications intelligence areas.
[Show full text]
Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas
Alan Turing, at age 35, about the time he wrote “Intelligent Machinery” Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc. lan Mathison Turing conceived of the modern computer in 1935. Today all digital comput- Aers are, in essence, “Turing machines.” The British mathematician also pioneered the field of artificial intelligence, or AI, proposing the famous and widely debated Turing test as a way of determin- ing whether a suitably programmed computer can think. During World War II, Turing was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code in part of a top-secret British operation that historians say short- ened the war in Europe by two years. When he died Alan Turing's at the age of 41, Turing was doing the earliest work on what would now be called artificial life, simulat- ing the chemistry of biological growth. Throughout his remarkable career, Turing had no great interest in publicizing his ideas. Consequently, Forgotten important aspects of his work have been neglected or forgotten over the years. In particular, few people— even those knowledgeable about computer science— are familiar with Turing’s fascinating anticipation of connectionism, or neuronlike computing. Also ne- Ideas glected are his groundbreaking theoretical concepts in the exciting area of “hypercomputation.” Accord- ing to some experts, hypercomputers might one day in solve problems heretofore deemed intractable. Computer Science The Turing Connection igital computers are superb number crunchers. DAsk them to predict a rocket’s trajectory or calcu- late the financial figures for a large multinational cor- poration, and they can churn out the answers in sec- Well known for the machine, onds.
[Show full text]
Algorithms, Turing Machines and Algorithmic Undecidability
U.U.D.M. Project Report 2021:7 Algorithms, Turing machines and algorithmic undecidability Agnes Davidsdottir Examensarbete i matematik, 15 hp Handledare: Vera Koponen Examinator: Martin Herschend April 2021 Department of Mathematics Uppsala University Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Algorithms . .1 1.2 Formalisation of the concept of algorithms . .1 2 Turing machines 3 2.1 Coding of machines . .4 2.2 Unbounded and bounded machines . .6 2.3 Binary sequences representing real numbers . .6 2.4 Examples of Turing machines . .7 3 Undecidability 9 i 1 Introduction This paper is about Alan Turing's paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, which was published in 1936. In his paper, he introduced what later has been called Turing machines as well as a few examples of undecidable problems. A few of these will be brought up here along with Turing's arguments in the proofs but using a more modern terminology. To begin with, there will be some background on the history of why this breakthrough happened at that given time. 1.1 Algorithms The concept of an algorithm has always existed within the world of mathematics. It refers to a process meant to solve a problem in a certain number of steps. It is often repetitive, with only a few rules to follow. In more recent years, the term also has been used to refer to the rules a computer follows to operate in a certain way. Thereby, an algorithm can be used in a plethora of circumstances. The word might describe anything from the process of solving a Rubik's cube to how search engines like Google work [4].
[Show full text]
The First Americans the 1941 US Codebreaking Mission to Bletchley Park
United States Cryptologic History The First Americans The 1941 US Codebreaking Mission to Bletchley Park Special series | Volume 12 | 2016 Center for Cryptologic History David J. Sherman is Associate Director for Policy and Records at the National Security Agency. A graduate of Duke University, he holds a doctorate in Slavic Studies from Cornell University, where he taught for three years. He also is a graduate of the CAPSTONE General/Flag Officer Course at the National Defense University, the Intelligence Community Senior Leadership Program, and the Alexander S. Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language in Moscow. He has served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs at the National War College and while there taught courses on strategy, inter- national relations, and intelligence. Among his other government assignments include ones as NSA’s representative to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council, and on the staff of the National Economic Council. This publication presents a historical perspective for informational and educational purposes, is the result of independent research, and does not necessarily reflect a position of NSA/CSS or any other US government entity. This publication is distributed free by the National Security Agency. If you would like additional copies, please email [email protected] or write to: Center for Cryptologic History National Security Agency 9800 Savage Road, Suite 6886 Fort George G. Meade, MD 20755 Cover: (Top) Navy Department building, with Washington Monument in center distance, 1918 or 1919; (bottom) Bletchley Park mansion, headquarters of UK codebreaking, 1939 UNITED STATES CRYPTOLOGIC HISTORY The First Americans The 1941 US Codebreaking Mission to Bletchley Park David Sherman National Security Agency Center for Cryptologic History 2016 Second Printing Contents Foreword ................................................................................
[Show full text]
Alan Turingturing –– Computercomputer Designerdesigner
AlanAlan TuringTuring –– ComputerComputer DesignerDesigner Brian E. Carpenter with input from Robert W. Doran The University of Auckland May 2012 Turing, the theoretician ● Turing is widely regarded as a pure mathematician. After all, he was a B-star Wrangler (in the same year as Maurice Wilkes) ● “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence. If this machine U is supplied with the tape on the beginning of which is written the string of quintuples separated by semicolons of some computing machine M, then U will compute the same sequence as M.” (1937) ● So how was he able to write Proposals for development in the Mathematics Division of an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) by the end of 1945? 2 Let’s read that carefully ● “It is possible to inventinvent a single machinemachine which can be used to compute any computable sequence. If this machinemachine U is supplied with the tapetape on the beginning of which is writtenwritten the string of quintuples separated by semicolons of some computing machinemachine M, then U will compute the same sequence as M.” ● The founding statement of computability theory was written in entirely physical terms. 3 What would it take? ● A tape on which you can write, read and erase symbols. ● Poulsen demonstrated magnetic wire recording in 1898. ● A way of storing symbols and performing simple logic. ● Eccles & Jordan patented the multivibrator trigger circuit (flip- flop) in 1919. ● Rossi invented the coincidence circuit (AND gate) in 1930. ● Building U in 1937 would have been only slightly more bizarre than building a differential analyser with Meccano.
[Show full text]
Alan Turing and the Turing Test
Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Faculty and Staff Publications By Year Faculty and Staff Publications 11-2014 Alan Turing and the Turing Test John P. MacCormick Dickinson College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.dickinson.edu/faculty_publications Part of the Computer Sciences Commons Recommended Citation MacCormick, John. "Alan Turing and the Turing Test." Dickinson Science Magazine 1, no. 2 (2014): 31. This article is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. I T*h..bqyl Alan Turing and the Turing Test John MacCormick Assoctets Pnoprsson or CovputEn ScrENct The movie is called The Imitation Game.Why? We'lI get back to that in a minute. First, who was Alan Turing, and why would anyone make a movie about him? He's sometimes described as a mathematician, some- times as an engineer, and sometimes as a computer scientist. All are true. His university degrees were in mathematics; he essentially founded the field of theoretical computer science with a breakthrough paper in the 1930s; and he later helped to engineer some of the earliest real computers. But for something worthy of the big screen, we can turn to Turing's contribution during the Second World War: he was a key member of the team that cracked the German naval Enigma code. It's generally accepted that his work saved many lives and considerably shortened the war. It also makes for an exciting movie script, especially when you consider that the work was done on a shoestring budget by a secret team operating at an English country mansion called Bletchley Park.
[Show full text]
Famous People in Computer History
Famous People in Computer History Charles Babbage Ada Lovelace George Boole 1791 - 1871 1815 - 1852 1815 - 1864 Babbage is often regarded as Lovelace is credited with the Boole invented the prototype the “Father of Computing”. title “the first programmer”. of what is now called Boolean He created the first Difference She worked with Charles logic, which is the basis of the Engine, the first programmable Babbage’s Analytical Engine to modern digital computer. computer in history and even develop what is recognised as Boole is often regarded in drew up plans for the first the first algorithm intended to hindsight as a founder of the printer. Babbage died before be processed by a machine. field of computer science. any of his designs could be She was the daughter of poet Boolean logic is based around the principle of AND, OR completed. Lord Byron. and NOT. Tommy Flowers Grace Hopper Alan Turing 1905 - 1998 1906 - 1992 1912 - 1954 Flowers created the worlds Hopper was a computer Turing is most famous for first electronic programmable scientist and US Navy Admiral. helping break the German computer - Colossus. She was the first to use the Enigma Code during WW2. He Colossus was used by British term “debugging” for fixing created the Bombe, a machine codebreaker in WW2 to computer problems. Hopper to decipher the Enigma code. decipher German code developed the first working He came up with the Turing messages. His work was not compiler and developed Test, a method to test artificial acknowledged until the 1970s. COBOL, a programming intelligence. language still used today.
[Show full text]