Learnings of the Week (Quennie Rose Colegado)

We have learned about the four basic periods, the pre-mechanical age, mechanical, electromechanical, and from first to fourth generation of computers. In the pre-mechanical age, it talks about the Writing and Alphabets - communication, Paper and Pens - input technologies, Books and Libraries - output technology, The First Numbering system and The First Calculators: The Abacus.The first human communicated only through speaking and simple drawings known as petroglyths. Many of these are pictures or sketches that visually resemble that which is depicted which are known as pictographs, geometric signs and ideographs. The Sumerians in Mesopotamia devised cuniform, the first true written language and the first real information system. Phoenicians created symbols that expressed single syllables and constants. The Greek later adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels. The Romans gave the letters Latin names.

nReligious leaders in Mesopotamia kept the earliest “books”. The Egyptians kept scrolls. The Greeks began to fold sheets of papyrus vertically into leaves and bind them together.
The numbering system of the Egyptians: The numbers 1-9 as vertical lines, the number 10 as a U or circle, the number 100 as coiled rope and the number 1000 as a louts blossom. The first numbering systems similar to those in use today were invented by Hindus in India who created a nine-digit numbering system. The abacus was man’s first recorded adding machine. The abacus was invented in Babaylonia, then popularized in China, the abacus is an ancient computing device constructed of sliding beads on small wooden rods, strung on a wooden frame.
The Mechanical Age:
Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1450's, and the first book to ever be printed was a Latin language Bible, printed in Mainz, Germany. Gutenberg’s Bibles were surprisingly beautiful, as each leaf Gutenberg printed was later colorfully hand-illuminated. Gutenberg was a victim of unscrupulous business associates who took control of his business and left him in poverty. John Napier introduces logarithms. Wilhelm Shickard, a professor at the University of Tubingen, Germany, invents the first mechanical calculator. William Oughtred, an English clergyman, invented the slide rule.A French mathematician named Blaise Pascal invented the a mechanical calculation machine. He called it the Pascaline. The Pascaline was made out of clock gears and levers and could solve basic mathematical problems like addition and subtraction.Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, German mathematician and philosopher. Invented a machine called the stepped reckoner that could multiply 5 digit and 12 digit numbers yielding up to 16 digit number. Joseph Marie Jacquard invented an automatic loom. Arithmometer became the first mass-produced calculator developed by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar in France. Charles Babbage, eccentric English mathematician invented the first modern computer design: a steam powered adding machine called “the difference engine”. He understood that long math problems were just repetitive operations. Therefore, the machine can automatically solve math problems.Babbage also invented the “analytical engine”. This engine was a mechanical adding machine that took information from punched cards to solve and print complex mathematical operations. Ada Augusta Lovelace.The first program was written by Lady Byron. She is credited as being the first computer programmer. The programming language Ada is named in her honor.
The Electromechanical Age:

The beginning of the telecommunication

• Voltaic Battery-

  The first electric battery, known as the Voltaire pile was invented 8th century by Alessandro Volta.

• Telegraph-

  Samuel F.J. Morse conceived of his version of an electromagnetic telegraph in 1832 and constructed an experiment version in 1815.

• Telephone and Radio-
  

Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Followed by the discovery that electrical waves travel through space and can produce an effect far from the point at which they originated by Guglielmo Marconi in 1894. These two events led to the invention of the radio 1852-George Boole develops binary algebra.

The four generations of digital Computer

The first generation computers

The second generation computers

The third generation computers

The fourth generation computers

The first generation of computers

Used vacuum tubes as their main logic elements; punched cards to input and externally store data; and rotating magnetic drums for internal storage of data in programs written in machine language (instructions written as a string of 0s and 1s) or assembly language (a language that allowed the programmer to write instructions in a kind of shorthand that would then be "translated" by another program called a compiler into machine language).

Second Generation Computers

In the 1940s, discovered that a class of crystalline mineral materials called semiconductors could be used in the design of a device called a transistor to replace vacuum tubes. Magnetic cores (very small donut-shaped magnets that could be polarized in one of two directions to represent data) strung on wire within the computer became the primary internal storage technology. Magnetic tape and disks began to replace punched cards as external storage devices.