-
In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition.
-
The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the calculating clock.
-
Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.
-
Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.
-
In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the "hanging chad" from the Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000?).
-
The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians
-
By 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns.
-
Zuse's third machine, the Z3, built in 1941, was probably the first operational, general-purpose, programmable (that is, software controlled) digital computer.
-
The ENIAC was the first digitel computer and cost almost $500,000. The macanic was the size of a small gym .
-
Computers had been around for 20 years before the first microprocessor was developed at Intel in 1971.
