The Evolution of Computing

The History of Computer Science

• The history of computer science can be traced back to mathematics and physics, with developments in previous centuries alluding to the discipline.

• The earliest known tool for computation was the abacus, developed in Sumer in 2700-2300 BCE.

• The Antikythera mechanism, believed to be an early mechanical analog computer, was designed to calculate astronomical positions and dates back to circa 100 BC.

• Mechanical analog computer devices were developed in the medieval Islamic world, including programmable machines and advances in cryptography.

• In the early 17th century, John Napier discovered logarithms for computational purposes, leading to the invention of calculating tools by inventors and scientists.

• In 1837, Charles Babbage developed the Analytical Engine, which is accepted as the first design for a modern computer.

• Ada Lovelace, Babbage's assistant, is credited as the pioneer of computer programming and designer of the first computer algorithm.

• Following Babbage, Percy Ludgate, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, and Vannevar Bush did follow-on research based on his work.

• In the 1930s, switching circuit theory provided the mathematical foundations and tools for digital system design.

• Alan Turing and Alonzo Church introduced the formalization of an algorithm and the Church-Turing thesis in 1936, with Turing also publishing his seminal work on the Universal Turing machine.

• The world's first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, was built in 1942, and the Manchester Baby, the first electronic digital computer that ran programs stored in its memory, was completed in 1948.

• Konrad Zuse developed the world's first functional program-controlled computer, the Z3, and designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül.Key Figures and Ideas in the History of Computing

• Alan Turing's ACE computer design called for a high-speed memory of roughly the same capacity as an early Macintosh computer, which was enormous by the standards of his day.

• The first actual computer bug was a moth, stuck in between the relays on the Harvard Mark II. The term 'bug' was not coined by Grace Hopper, but other accounts conflict as to the exact date of the incident.

• Claude Shannon founded the field of information theory with his 1948 paper titled A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which applied probability theory to the problem of how to best encode information a sender wants to transmit.

• Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics from the Greek word for "steersman" and published "Cybernetics" in 1948, which influenced artificial intelligence.

• Von Neumann architecture was introduced in 1946 and provided uniformity in subsequent computer designs. The von Neumann machine design uses a RISC architecture with a total of 21 instructions to perform all tasks.

• The term artificial intelligence was credited by John McCarthy, who proposed a research project in 1955 with Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon. They sought to understand AI's makeup and how humans understand language and structure to write programs with specific rulesets.

• Computational creativity is the idea of how a machine can take incomplete information and improve upon it to fill in missing details, similar to human thinking.