history of computer science

who contro the past command the future. who command the future conquers the past.

A Very Brief History of Computer Science Written by Jeffrey Shallit for CS 134 at the University of
Waterloo in the summer of 1995. This little web page was hastily stitched together in a few
days. Perhaps eventually I will get around to doing a
really good job. Suggestions are always welcome.
A translation of this web page into French has been
prepared by Anne Dicky at the University of Bordeaux.

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Before 1900 People have been using mechanical devices to aid
calculation for thousands of years. For example, the
abacus probably existed in Babylonia (present-day Iraq)
about 3000 B.C.E. The ancient Greeks developed some
very sophisticated analog computers. In 1901, an ancient
Greek shipwreck was discovered off the island of
Antikythera. Inside was a salt-encrusted device (now
called the Antikythera mechanism) that consisted of
rusted metal gears and pointers. When this c. 80 B.C.E.
device was reconstructed, it produced a mechanism for
predicting the motions of the stars and planets. (More
Antikythera info here.) John Napier (1550-1617), the Scottish inventor of
logarithms, invented Napier's rods (sometimes called
"Napier's bones") c. 1610 to simplify the task of
multiplication.
In 1641 the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise
Pascal (1623-1662) built a mechanical adding machine.
Similar work was done by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716). Leibniz also advocated use of the binary
system for doing calculations.
Recently it was discovered that Wilhelm Schickard
(1592-1635), a graduate of the University of Tübingen
(Germany), constructed such a device in 1623-4, before
both Pascal and Leibniz. A brief description of the device
is contained in two letters to Johannes Kepler.
Unfortunately, at least one copy of the machine burned up
in a fire, and Schickard himself died of bubonic plague in
1635, during the Thirty Years' War.
Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) invented a loom that
could weave complicated patterns described by holes in
punched cards. Charles Babbage (1791-1871) worked on
two mechanical devices: the Difference Engine and the far
more ambitious Analytical Engine (a precursor of the
modern digital computer), but neither worked
satisfactorily. (Babbage was a bit of an eccentric -- one
biographer calls him an "irascible genius" -- and was
probably the model for Daniel Doyce in Charles Dickens'
novel, Little Dorrit. A little-known fact about Babbage is
that he invented the science of dendrochronology --
tree-ring dating -- but never pursued his invention. In his
later years, Babbage devoted much of his time to the
persecution of street musicians (organ-grinders).) The
Difference Engine can be viewed nowadays in the Science
Museum in London, England.
One of Babbage's friends, Ada Augusta Byron, Countess of
Lovelace (1815-1852), sometimes is called the "first
programmer" because of a report she wrote on Babbage's
machine. (The programming language Ada was named for
her.)
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), a British economist
and logician, built a machine in 1869 to solve logic
problems. It was "the first such machine with sufficient
power to solve a complicated problem faster than the
problem could be solved without the machine's aid."
(Gardner) It is now in the Oxford Museum of the History of
Science.
Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) invented the modern
punched card for use in a machine he designed to help
tabulate the 1890 census.

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1900 - 1939: The Rise of Mathematics Work on calculating machines continued. Some
special-purpose calculating machines were built. For
example, in 1919, E. O. Carissan (1880-1925), a lieutenant
in the French infantry, designed and had built a marvelous
mechanical device for factoring integers and testing them
for primality. The Spaniard Leonardo Torres y Quevedo
(1852-1936) built some electromechanical calculating
devices, including one that played simple chess
endgames. In 1928, the German mathematician David Hilbert
(1862-1943) addressed the International Congress of
Mathematicians. He posed three questions: (1) Is
mathematics complete; i.e. can every mathematical
statement be either proved or disproved? (2) Is
mathematics consistent, that is, is it true that statements
such as "0 = 1" cannot be proved by valid methods? (3) Is
mathematics decidable, that is, is there a mechanical
method that can be applied to any mathematical
assertion and (at least in principle) will eventually tell
whether that assertion is true or not? This last question
was called the Entscheidungsproblem.
In 1931, Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) answered two of Hilbert's
questions. He showed that every sufficiently powerful
formal system is either inconsistent or incomplete. Also, if
an axiom system is consistent, this consistency cannot
be proved within itself. The third question remained open,
with 'provable' substituted for 'true'.
In 1936, Alan Turing (1912-1954) provided a solution to
Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem by constructing a formal
model of a computer -- the Turing machine -- and showing
that there were problems such a machine could not solve.
One such problem is the so-called "halting problem": given
a Pascal program, does it halt on all inputs?

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1940's: Wartime brings the birth of the electronic digital
computer The calculations required for ballistics during World War II
spurred the development of the general-purpose
electronic digital computer. At Harvard, Howard H. Aiken
(1900-1973) built the Mark I electromechanical computer
in 1944, with the assistance of IBM. Military code-breaking also led to computational projects.
Alan Turing was involved in the breaking of the code
behind the German machine, the Enigma, at Bletchley
Park in England. The British built a computing device, the
Colossus, to assist with code-breaking.
At Iowa State University in 1939, John Vincent Atanasoff
(1904-1995) and Clifford Berry designed and built an
electronic computer for solving systems of linear
equations, but it never worked properly.
Atanasoff discussed his invention with John William
Mauchly (1907-1980), who later, with J. Presper Eckert, Jr.
(1919-1995), designed and built the ENIAC, a
general-purpose electronic computer originally intended
for artillery calculations. Exactly what ideas Mauchly got
from Atanasoff is not complely clear, and whether
Atanasoff or Mauchly and Eckert deserve credit as the
originators of the electronic digital computer was the
subject of legal battles and ongoing historical debate. The
ENIAC was built at the Moore School at the University of
Pennsylvania, and was finished in 1946.
In 1944, Mauchly, Eckert, and John von Neumann
(1903-1957) were already at work designing a
stored-program electronic computer, the EDVAC. Von
Neumann's report, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC",
was very influential and contains many of the ideas still
used in most modern digital computers, including a
mergesort routine. Eckert and Mauchly went on to build
UNIVAC.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) built the
first operational, general-purpose, program-controlled
calculator, the Z3, in 1941. More information about Zuse
can be found here.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush published a surprisingly prescient
article in the Atlantic Monthly about the ways information
processing would affect the society of the future. (Another
copy of the Bush article appears here.)
Maurice Wilkes (b. 1913), working in Cambridge, England,
built the EDSAC, a computer based on the EDVAC. F. C.
Williams (b. 1911) and others at Manchester University
built the Manchester Mark I, one version of which was
working as early as June 1948. This machine is
sometimes called the first stored-program digital
computer.
The invention of the transistor in 1947 by John Bardeen
(1908-1991), Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and William
Shockley (1910-1989) transformed the computer and
made possible the microprocessor revolution. For this
discovery they won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.
(Shockley later became notorious for his racist views.)
Jay Forrester (b. 1918) invented magnetic core memory c.
1949. More about Forrester here.

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1950's Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) invented the notion of a
compiler, at Remington Rand, in 1951. Earlier, in 1947,
Hopper found the first computer "bug" -- a real one -- a
moth that had gotten into the Harvard Mark II. (Actually,
the use of ``bug'' to mean defect goes back to at least
1889.) John Backus and others developed the first FORTRAN
compiler in April 1957. LISP, a list-processing language for
artificial intelligence programming, was invented by John
McCarthy about 1958. Alan Perlis, John Backus, Peter
Naur and others developed Algol.
In hardware, Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) and Robert
Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor) invented the integrated
circuit in 1959.
Edsger Dijkstra invented an efficient algorithm for
shortest paths in graphs as a demonstration of the ARMAC
computer in 1956. He also invented an efficient algorithm
for the minimum spanning tree in order to minimize the
wiring needed for the X1 computer. (Dijkstra is famous for
his caustic, opinionated memos. For example, see his
opinions of some programming languages).
In a famous paper that appeared in the journal Mind in
1950, Alan Turing introduced the Turing Test, one of the
first efforts in the field of artificial intelligence. He
proposed a definition of "thinking" or "consciousness"
using a game: a tester would have to decide, on the basis
of written conversation, whether the entity in the next
room responding to the tester's queries was a human or a
computer. If this distinction could not be made, then it
could be fairly said that the computer was "thinking".
In 1952, Alan Turing was arrested for "gross indecency"
after a burglary led to the discovery of his affair with
Arnold Murray. Overt homosexuality was taboo in 1950's
England, and Turing was forced to take estrogen
"treatments" which rendered him impotent and caused
him to grow breasts. On June 7, 1954, despondent over
his situation, Turing committed suicide by eating an apple
laced with cyanide.

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1960's In the 1960's, computer science came into its own as a
discipline. In fact, the term was coined by George
Forsythe, a numerical analyst. The first computer science
department was formed at Purdue University in 1962. The
first person to receive a Ph. D. from a computer science
department was Richard Wexelblat, at the University of
Pennsylvania, in December 1965. Operating systems saw major advances. Fred Brooks at
IBM designed System/360, a line of different computers
with the same architecture and instruction set, from small
machine to top-of-the-line. Edsger Dijkstra at Eindhoven
designed the THE multiprogramming system.
At the end of the decade, ARPAnet, a precursor to today's
Internet, began to be constructed.
Many new programming languages were invented, such
as BASIC (developed c. 1964 by John Kemeny (1926-1992)
and Thomas Kurtz (b. 1928)).
The 1960's also saw the rise of automata theory and the
theory of formal languages. Big names here include Noam
Chomsky and Michael Rabin. Chomsky later became
well-known for his theory that language is "hard-wired" in
human brains, and for his criticism of American foreign
policy.
Proving correctness of programs using formal methods
also began to be more important in this decade. The work
of Tony Hoare played an important role. Hoare also
invented Quicksort.
Douglas C. Englebart invents the computer mouse c. 1968,
at SRI.
Ted Hoff (b. 1937) and Federico Faggin at Intel designed
the first microprocessor (computer on a chip) in
1969-1971.
A rigorous mathematical basis for the analysis of
algorithms began with the work of Donald Knuth (b. 1938),
author of 3-volume treatise entitled The Art of Computer
Programming.

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1970's The theory of databases saw major advances with the
work of Edgar F. Codd on relational databases. Codd won
the Turing award in 1981. Unix, a very influential operating system, was developed
at Bell Laboratories by Ken Thompson (b. 1943) and
Dennis Ritchie (b. 1941). Brian Kernighan and Ritchie
together developed C, an influential programming
language.
Other new programming languages, such as Pascal
(invented by Niklaus Wirth) and Ada (developed by a team
led by Jean Ichbiah), arose.
The first RISC architecture was begun by John Cocke in
1975, at the Thomas J. Watson Laboratories of IBM.
Similar projects started at Berkeley and Stanford around
this time.
The 1970's also saw the rise of the supercomputer.
Seymour Cray (b. 1925) designed the CRAY-1, which was
first shipped in March 1976. It could perform 160 million
operations in a second. The Cray XMP came out in 1982.
Cray Research was taken over by Silicon Graphics.
There were also major advances in algorithms and
computational complexity. In 1971, Steve Cook published
his seminal paper on NP-completeness, and shortly
thereafter, Richard Karp showed that many natural
combinatorial problems were NP-complete. Whit Diffie and
Martin Hellman published a paper that introduced the
theory of public-key cryptography, and a public-key
cryptosystem known as RSA was invented by Ronald
Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman.
In 1979, three graduate students in North Carolina
developed a distributed news server which eventually
became Usenet.
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1980's This decade also saw the rise of the personal computer,
thanks to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, founders of
Apple Computer. The first computer viruses are developed c. 1981. The
term was coined by Leonard Adleman, now at the
University of Southern California.
In 1981, the first truly successful portable computer was
marketed, the Osborne I. In 1984, Apple first marketed the
Macintosh computer.
In 1987, the US National Science Foundation started
NSFnet, precursor to part of today's Internet.

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1990's and Beyond Parallel computers continue to be developed. Biological computing, with the recent work of Len
Adleman on doing computations via DNA, has great
promise. The Human Genome Project is attempting to
sequence all the DNA in a single human being.
Quantum computing gets a boost with the discovery by
Peter Shor that integer factorization can be performed
efficiently on a (theoretical) quantum computer.
The "Information Superhighway" links more and more
computers worldwide.
Computers get smaller and smaller; the birth of
nano-technology.

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Other Web Resources for History of Computer Science History of Computing web page at Virginia Tech Computers from the Past to the Present (A lecture by
Michelle Hoyle at the University of Regina) A Brief History of Computer Technology Past Notable Women of Computing The Machine That Changed the World Historic Computer Images Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of
Information Processing Turing Award Winners, 1966-1998 The Retrocomputing Museum (old programs and
programming languages) The ENIAC Virtual Museum at the University of
Pennsylvania (under construction) COMMPUTERSEUM -- The Commercial Computing Museum
(Waterloo, Ontario) The Computer Museum (Boston, Massachusetts) The Virtual Museum of Computing Museum of Obsolete Computers Annals of the History of Computing Grace Murray Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Index for History of Computers History of the Electronic Computer Histoire de l'Informatique Theory of Computing Hall of Fame Frank Delaney's History of the Microcomputer

check that.............

who contro the past command the future. who command the future conquers the past.