Broadthinking tech

New information and communication technologies in society

  • 2500 BCE

    Mesopotamia (Irak)

    Mesopotamia (Irak)
    La tablilla Plimpton= is a Babylonian clay tablet, notable as containing an example of Babylonian mathematics. It has number 322 in the G.A. Plimpton Collection at Columbia University. This tablet, believed to have been written about 1800 BC, has a table of four columns and 15 rows of numbers in the cuneiform script of the period.
  • 2000 BCE

    Mesopotamia

    Mesopotamia
    Ábaco= The abacus (plural abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool that was in use in Europe, China and Russia, centuries before the adoption of the written Hindu–Arabic numeral system.The exact origin of the abacus is still unknown. Today, abacuses are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone, or metal.
  • 500 BCE

    Precolombia

    Precolombia
    Calendario mesoamericano= Mesoamerican calendars are the calendrical systems devised and used by the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica. Besides keeping time, Mesoamerican calendars were also used in religious observances and social rituals, such as for divination. The existence of Mesoamerican calendars is known as early as ca. 500 BCE, with the essentials already appearing fully defined and functional.
  • John Napier

    John Napier
    It would be in the early seventeenth century when the Scottish mathematician John Napier invented this device, which consisted of a series of wooden bars containing multiplication tables, thus avoiding the memorization of them and was of great help in the realization of multiplication and division operations with a high number of figures.
  • Wilhem Schickard

    Wilhem Schickard
    The calculating clock or also called the Schickard machine is an automatic machine created in 1623 by the German mathematician William Schickard.
    It was the first in history to be built (Leonardo da Vinci had already designed an adding machine, but it had never been built due to the advancement of technology at that time). The calculating clock could perform, through totally mechanical methods, the four elementary arithmetic operations: add, subtract, multiply and divide.
  • Edmund Wingate

    Edmund Wingate
    The slide rule, also known colloquially in the United States as a slipstick,is a mechanical analog computer. The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as exponents, roots, logarithms and trigonometry, but typically not for addition or subtraction. Though similar in name and appearance to a standard ruler, the slide rule is not meant to be used for measuring length or drawing straight lines.
  • Blaise Pascal

    Blaise Pascal
    Pascal's calculator (also known as the arithmetic machine or Pascaline) is a mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal in the early 17th century. Pascal was led to develop a calculator by the laborious arithmetical calculations required by his father's work as supervisor of taxes in Rouen.He designed the machine to add and subtract two numbers directly and to perform multiplication and division through repeated addition or subtraction.
  • Sir Samuel Morlan

    Sir Samuel Morlan
    Multiplication machine consists of an articulated lid with perforated windows, a series of discs with engraved numbers and axes in which the discs were placed. The disks were a circular version of the Neper tables. In them the digits corresponding to the tens and units of each product were engraved on opposite sides.
  • Wilhelm Leibniz

    Wilhelm Leibniz
    Leibniz invented an arithmetic machine, whose system has been used in the mechanical calculaiting machines until the years 1960. An article by Yves Serra explains its operation in detail.The mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz describes in a text of 1710 his arithmetic machine, in which he worked since 1673, and that allows multiplication by moving a moving part in a place to the left, as when done with pencil and paper.
  • Joseph Jacquard

    Joseph Jacquard
    A punched card or punch card is a piece of stiff paper that can be used to contain digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Digital data can be used for data processing applications or, in earlier examples, used to directly control automated machinery.
  • Charles Babbage

    Charles Babbage
    The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a simpler mechanical computer.
  • Ada Lovelace

    Ada Lovelace
    The Notes were labeled alphabetically from A to G. Note G was dedicated to Bernoulli's numbers; in this section Ada describes in detail the operations by which the punched cards "would weave" a sequence of numbers in the analytical machine. This code is considered as the first algorithm specifically designed to be executed by a computer, although it was never tested since the machine was never built.
  • George Boole

    George Boole
    Boolean algebra, also called Boolean algebra, in digital electronics, computer science and mathematics is an algebraic structure that schematizes logical operations. It is named in honor of George Boole (November 2, 1815 to December 8, 1864), a self-taught English mathematician, who was the first to define it as part of a logical system, initially in a small booklet.
  • Herman Hollerith

    Herman Hollerith
    Herman Hollerith (Buffalo, New York, February 29, 1860 - November 17, 1929). He was an inventor who developed an electromagnetic tabulator of punched cards to help in the summary of the information and, later, the accounting. He was the founder of the tabulation machine company that was merged (through stock acquisition) in 1911 with three other companies to form a fifth of the company, the Computer Tabulating Recording Company later called International Business Machines (IBM).
  • Leonardo Torres Quevedo

    Leonardo Torres Quevedo
    The Spanish engineer and mathematician Leonardo Torres Quevedo presented in 1894 to the Royal Academy of Sciences a memoir on the invention of his machine that allowed solving algebraic equations.The machine presents two innovations: The use of the logarithmic scale (which allows the evaluation of monomials to be reduced to sums) and the "Spindles without end" created by Quevedo.The purpose of the machine was to obtain polynomial functions continuously and automatically.
  • German Army

    German Army
    Enigma was the name of a rotor machine that allowed to use it both to encrypt and to decipher messages.It was patented in 1918 by the German company Scherbius & Ritter who had purchased the patent of a Dutch inventor, and it was put on sale in 1923 for commercial use.1 In 1926, the German Navy adopted it. for military use and shortly after its use was extended to the other German armed forces, 2 being its use extended before and during the Second World War.
  • Vannevar Bush

    Vannevar Bush
    The differential analyzer (in English, Differential analyzer) was a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using mechanisms of wheels and discs to perform the integration. It was one of the first advanced computing devices to be used operationally.The analyzer was invented in 1876 by James Thomson, Lord Kelvin's brother. A practical version was first built by Harold Locke Hazen and Vannevar Bush in early 1927 at MIT.
  • Alan Turing

    Alan Turing
    In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine that can simulate an arbitrary Turing machine at arbitrary input. The universal machine essentially accomplishes this by reading both the description of the machine to be simulated as well as the very input of its own tape. Alan Turing introduced this machine in 1936-1937.
  • Period: to

    John Atanasoff

    The Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) was the first automatic electronic and digital computer that was used with numbers and letters (although now this is attributed to the Z1 of Konrad Zuse completed in 1938). It was built by Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff with the help of Clifford Edward Berry between 1937 and 1942 at the 'Iowa State University', which then received the name of 'Iowa State College'.
  • Period: to

    Konrad Zuse

    the first programmable computer in history. Konrad Zuse, German engineer, design and made the Z1, which for many is the first programmable computer in history. The Z1 was a binary mechanical calculator operated with electricity and that occupied a whole table, quite large by the way.
  • George Robert Stibitz

    George Robert Stibitz
    George R. Stibitz, was an American scientist known mostly for his work in the 30s and 40s on the development of digital logic circuits, using electromechanical relays as switches.At the end of his studies, he joined the Bell Laboratories as a mathematical consultant. From 1940 to 1945, he worked at the US Office of Scientific Research and Development. During World War II, he was a consultant in mathematics for several agencies of the US government.
  • Norbert Wiener

    Norbert Wiener
    Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician, known as the founder of cybernetics.1 He coined the term in his book Cybernetics or the control and communication in animals and machines, published in 1948.Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems.
  • Alan Turing

    Alan Turing
    The Colossus machines were the first electronic computing devices used by the British to read German encrypted communications during World War II. Colossus was one of the first digital computers.The Colossus machine was originally designed by Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill. The prototype, Colossus Mark I, came into operation at Bletchley Park from February 1944.
  • Howard H. Aiken con IBM

    Howard H. Aiken con IBM
    Harvard Mark I= The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), better known as Harvard Mark I or Mark I, was the first electromechanical computer, built at IBM and shipped to Harvard in 1944. It had 760,000 wheels and 800 kilometers of cable and was machine-based xxxIt worked with relays, was programmed with switches and read the data from perforated paper tapes.