We get our names from our parents. When something new is discovered, it is
usually people who name the new object or event. Being in a technological era,
computers are used a lot of industries and in homes. As important as it is,
have you ever wondered where the word "computer" got its name? It is
actually quite interesting. In fact, if you think about it, the word
"computer" is very similar to the word "
compute,"
which means to "to determine by calculation; calculate."
Let's start from an earlier time before computers ever came to be. There was
a man,
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, who
developed logic into a binary system that we know of today; it was more of a
mathematical system than an English system. Like the Boolean, started by George
Boole, it is the same as something being true and something being false. The 1
represented true and the 0 represented false. This idea was used in real work
situations. For example, it was used in punch cards that workers used to sign
in and sign out of their work shift during the industrial revolution.
Soon after, before computers became electronic,
computers
were actually clerks that performed computations. Many of these computers were
women at the time. Many of these women having a math degree, they worked in
different areas such as in government and in research facilities. More
mechanical devices were made, and computers were then known as computing
machines that did the job of a human computer. These computers performed much
faster than human computers. Throughout time, mechanical computers became were
the analog kind, then the digital kind, and now the computer architecture it is
today.
Computer programming and computer scientists could not have existed if there
were no computer to use in the first place. The computer, from human to
machine, is definitely an important part of computer science history.
Hey Ryan, great job on the article. You do well to tell of the human need for computational devices and how we achieved that. I also think its really well done that you included binary and did a short explanation of it and its relevancy and great importance to computation development and modern day computer science. Awesome article!
ReplyDeleteExcellent, Ryan! Your article is very informative, and it's very interesting. Yes, computer is something that compute, and we use the results from computer's calculations to serve our purposes. More importantly, the calculation speed of a computer is extremely high. Thus, it saves human power. Furthermore, I agree with you that computer existence gives birth to programming and computer scientist. If no computer exists, no human would be able to set foot on the moon.
ReplyDeleteHi Ryan,
ReplyDeleteThis is a well written post of computers. I learned a lot from it. Of course, without computers and the idea of computing, computer science would not have had the opportunity to develop. I'm glad that Leibniz and Boole developed the binary system. Boolean values are used a lot in my C programming assignments, and they also make other programming assignments in Java a lot easier.
Well done writing a brief and concise explanation of history of computer science.
Hello Ryan,
ReplyDeleteThis is my first time checking out your blog, and I enjoyed your post. You detailed the history of the first literal computers very well, and the post itself was very cohesive. I agree that the computers of our age couldn't exist without the computers you detailed! The use of pictures and links was very useful as well. The topic was the history of computer science from your point of view, and I would have liked to hear how this related to yourself a little more. Aside from that, great post!
Good post!
Hey Ryan.
ReplyDeleteFantastic summary of how the modern-day computer became what it is now. Without being able to compute using the binary system, it would be much more difficult today to work on a very low-level with computers, if not perhaps impossible. Many people seem to forget that high-level languages, like Java, simply aren't the closest we can come to communicating with machines. You have a very nice way of explaining how important that is.
Perhaps next time you could try to use legitimate papers or other concrete research to further expand on your ideas. Your thoughts were quite interesting, but not very deep. If you can work out those kinks, I think your topic would be very solidly written.