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 years it took to compile data from the previous census by hand!

In 1848 George Boole, another British Mathematician, developed a system of binary logic in which all question could be answered a “true” of “false” It was almost a hundred years, however, before a computer was developed based on binary numbers using Boolean logic or Boolean algebra.

Until the late1930’s, calculators or computers were based on the decimal system, mechanical devise that required hundreds of moving parts. The transition to binary logic allowed the use of electrical circuitry, that is, switches that were turned on or off, to perform complex calculations.