Forerunners of the Modern Computer

Credit for the concept of the modern computer goes to the British mathematician Charles Babbage who in the 1830’s designed a steam-powered ‘analytical engine’ that worked with punch cards. Although Babbage worked for decades at perfecting his design, he never built the machine.

In the 1880’s, American inventor Herman Hollerith developed a ‘tabulator’ to manipulate data on punch cards. The device was used to compile data from the 1890 census in less that two months compared to the more than seven                                                                                                           Read more