History of Computing

From ICT4D Wiki

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716): invented the step reckoner (or stepped reckoner), a digital mechanical calculator.

Johann Helfrich von Müller (1746–1830): was an engineer in the Hessian army who in 1786 conceived the idea that would later evolve into modern computers, the difference engine. He was also, in 1784, responsible for an improved adding machine based on principles of Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner.

Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752–1834): played an important role in the development of the earliest programmable loom in 1801, the "Jacquard loom", which in turn played an important role in the development of other programmable machines, such as computers.

Charles Babbage (1791–1871): originated the concept of a programmable computer. He began in 1822 with what he called the difference engine, made to compute values of polynomial functions. Unlike similar efforts of the time, Babbage's difference engine was created to calculate a series of values automatically. Soon after the attempt at making the difference engine crumbled, Babbage started designing a different, more complex machine called the analytical engine. The engine is not a single physical machine but a succession of designs that he tinkered with until his death in 1871. The main difference between the two engines is that the Analytical Engine could be programmed using punch cards.

Ada Byron Lovelace (1815–1852): She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, encoding an algorithm in a form to be processed by a machine—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built.

Herman Hollerith (1860–1929): was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards in order to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.


Alan Turing (1912–1954): was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was influential in the development of computer science and provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, a theoretical device that manipulates symbols contained on a strip of tape, described in 1937.

Claude Shannon (1916–2001): an American electronic engineer and mathematician, is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. He is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's student at MIT, he wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship.