Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by Erickson wallace
Authors: Erickson wallace
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life-expectancy tables. In 1834, having already invented the speedometer and the cowcatcher for locomotives, Babbage put all his creative energies into the design of a steam-powered machine he called the “Analytical Engine.” Frustrated by inaccuracies he found in the mathematical tables of the day, Babbage wanted to build a machine to solve mathematical equations. On paper, his Analytical Engine consisted of thousands of gears and cogs turned by steam, and a logic center that Babbage called “the mill.” His design called for a machine the size of a football field. Such an undertaking also called for huge sums of money, and when the government stopped backing the project, Babbage was helped financially by Augusta Ada, the Countess of Lovelace and daughter of the poet Lord Byron. The beautiful and scientific- minded countess was a fine mathematician herself and is now considered the first computer programmer. The countess planned to use punch cards to instruct the Analytical Engine what to do. She got the idea from the cards used on Jacquard looms to determine the design on cloth. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” she wrote.
Although Babbage devoted almost 40 years of his life to the project, his Analytical Engine was never completed. The technology just wasn’t there to make it possible.
By the end of the century, however, punch cards were used in a test to help tabulate information from the 1890 Census. The electric tabulating machine used in this experiment was designed by a young engineer named Herman Hollerith. Soon, punch cards were widely used in all kinds of office machines, and Hollerith’s company was absorbed by a New York firm that would later become the biggest name in computers—International Business Machines.
In the 1930s, IBM agreed to finance the development of a large computing machine. It gave Howard Aiken, a Harvard professor for whom the university’s computer center was later named, $500,000 to develop the Mark 1. When it was finally completed in 1944, the Mark 1 could multiply two 23-digit numbers in about five seconds. But it was an electromechanical machine, which meant that thousands of noisy relays served as switching units, opening and closing as the machine performed its dim-witted calculations.
The vacuum tube soon replaced electromechanical relay switches and gave birth to ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer in the United States. It was unveiled in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. Built to calculate artillery firing tables for the military, ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors. It took up more space than the average two-car garage. The ENIAC cost about a half-million dollars to develop and could handle about 5,000 additions and subtractions per second. Today, any inexpensive home computer can outperform the ENIAC. The machine was not very reliable. Its tubes failed on the average of once every seven minutes. Still, it was used during final stages of completion to do mathematical calculations for the physicists at Los Alamos who were building the first atomic bomb.
The big breakthrough in computing technology came two days before Christmas in 1947, when three scientists working at Bell Labs tested a crystal device known as the transistor, short for “transfer resistance.” (They would win the Nobel Prize for the invention.) These tiny crystals, or semiconductors as they became known, acted like switches, controlling the flow of electricity in circuits. Semiconductors replaced the vacuum tube. They were much smaller and more reliable. They didn’t give off as much heat as tubes did, so they could be packaged close together. They had no moving parts, so they were less likely to fail. And perhaps most important of all, semiconductors were cheap to make. The first ones were made out of
Although Babbage devoted almost 40 years of his life to the project, his Analytical Engine was never completed. The technology just wasn’t there to make it possible.
By the end of the century, however, punch cards were used in a test to help tabulate information from the 1890 Census. The electric tabulating machine used in this experiment was designed by a young engineer named Herman Hollerith. Soon, punch cards were widely used in all kinds of office machines, and Hollerith’s company was absorbed by a New York firm that would later become the biggest name in computers—International Business Machines.
In the 1930s, IBM agreed to finance the development of a large computing machine. It gave Howard Aiken, a Harvard professor for whom the university’s computer center was later named, $500,000 to develop the Mark 1. When it was finally completed in 1944, the Mark 1 could multiply two 23-digit numbers in about five seconds. But it was an electromechanical machine, which meant that thousands of noisy relays served as switching units, opening and closing as the machine performed its dim-witted calculations.
The vacuum tube soon replaced electromechanical relay switches and gave birth to ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer in the United States. It was unveiled in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. Built to calculate artillery firing tables for the military, ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors. It took up more space than the average two-car garage. The ENIAC cost about a half-million dollars to develop and could handle about 5,000 additions and subtractions per second. Today, any inexpensive home computer can outperform the ENIAC. The machine was not very reliable. Its tubes failed on the average of once every seven minutes. Still, it was used during final stages of completion to do mathematical calculations for the physicists at Los Alamos who were building the first atomic bomb.
The big breakthrough in computing technology came two days before Christmas in 1947, when three scientists working at Bell Labs tested a crystal device known as the transistor, short for “transfer resistance.” (They would win the Nobel Prize for the invention.) These tiny crystals, or semiconductors as they became known, acted like switches, controlling the flow of electricity in circuits. Semiconductors replaced the vacuum tube. They were much smaller and more reliable. They didn’t give off as much heat as tubes did, so they could be packaged close together. They had no moving parts, so they were less likely to fail. And perhaps most important of all, semiconductors were cheap to make. The first ones were made out of
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