ABACUS: First machine use in computing and also counting frame. Abacus or abaco refers to calculations, especially the subject of direct calculations, using Hindu numerals without the help of the abacus (an instrument for calculating)
NAPIER'S BONES- a manually-operated calculating device created by John Napier of Merchiston for calculation of products and quotients of numbers.
JOHN NAPIER: Live Merchiston [1550 – 4 April 1617) – also signed as Neper, Nepair – named Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematici-an, physicist, and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchistoun. John Napier is best known as the inventor of logarithms. He also invented the so-called "Napier's bones" and made common the use of the decimal point in arithmetic and mathematics.
PASCALINE- Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical calculator in 1642. He was spurred to it by seeing the burden of arithmetical labor involved in his father's official work as supervisor of taxes at Rouen; first called the Arithmetic Machine, Pascal's Calculator and later Pascaline, this calculating machine could add and subtract two numbers directly and multiply and divide by repetition.
BLAISE PASCAL: (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen.In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he invented the mechanical calculator.He built 20 of these machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines ) in the following ten years.
JACQUARD'S LOOM- is a mechanical loom that has holes punched in pasteboard, each row of which corresponds to one row of the design. Multiple rows of holes are punched on each card and the many cards that compose the design of the textile are strung together in order. It is based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques Vaucanson (1740).
JOSE MARIE JACQUARD: Jacquard’s surname was not technically “Jacquard”; it was Charles. In his grandfather’s generation, several branches of the Charles family lived in Lyon’s Couzon-au-Mont d’Or suburb (on Lyon’s north side, along the Saône River).n 1801, Jacquard exhibited his invention at the industrial exhibition in Paris; and in 1803 he was summoned to Paris and attached to the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Although his invention was fiercely opposed by the silk-weavers, who feared that its introduction, owing to the saving of labour, would deprive them of their livelihood, its advantages secured its general adoption.
PUNCHED CARDS
Beginning of computers
MUHAMMAD IBN MUSA ABU JAFAR: Al-Khwārizmī's contributions to mathematics, geogra-phy, astronomy, and cartography established the basis for innovation in algebra and trigonometry. His systematic approach to solving linear and quadratic equations led to algebra, a word derived from the title of his 830 book on the subject, "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing" On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals written about 825, was principally responsible for spreading the Indian system of numeration throughout the Middle East andEurope. It was translated into Latin as Algoritmi de numero Indorum. Al-Khwārizmī, rendered as (Latin) Algoritmi, led to the term "algorithm".
CALCULATING CLOCK- This six-digit machine could add, subtract, multiply and divide. A set of Napier’s Bones was attached to the Clock in order to perform the mathematical operations. It used a bell to indicate overflow (when the calculation produced a result too large for the machine to represent).
WILHELM SHICKARD: (22 April 1592 – 24 October 1635) was a German professor of Hebrew and Astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Dr. Franz Hammer, a biographer (along with Max Caspar) of Johannes Kepler, claimed that the drawings of a calculating clock, predating the public release of Pascal's calculator by twenty years, had been discovered in two unknown letters written by Schickard to Johannes Kepler in 1623 and 1624.
TEN'S COMPLEMENT- Subtraction can be done with this system.
ANALYTICAL ENGINE- was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's Difference engine, a design for a mechanical computer. The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.
CHARLES BABBAGE, FRS(26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath.He was a mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, who is best remembered now for originating the concept of a programmable computer. Considered a "father of the computer". Parts of Babbage's uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked.