Museum of Communication at Burntisland

Information Technology (milestone table)

Today’s technology driven society has come about through the mechanisation of computation. In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz with his Calculus Philosophicus, introduced the first system of formal logic as well as constructed a machine for automating its calculation (Leibniz, 1887). Logic is a formalisation of the human “thinking” process. However, computers cannot reason as we do (at least not yet!). In the 19th century, the British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage worked out the principles of the modern digital computer. He conceived a number of machines, such as the Difference Engine, that were designed to handle complicated mathematical problems. Many historians consider Babbage and his associate, the mathematician Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, the true pioneers of the modern digital computer. One of Babbage’s designs, the Analytical Engine, had many features of a modern computer. It had an input stream in the form of a deck of punched cards, a “store” for saving data, a “mill” for arithmetic operations, and a printer that made a permanent record. Babbage failed to put this idea into practice, though it may well have been technically possible at that date.

During World War II a team of scientists and mathematicians, working at Bletchley Park, north of London, created one of the first all-electronic digital computers: Colossus. By December 1943, Colossus, which incorporated 1,500 vacuum tubes, was operational. It was used by the team headed by Alan Turing, in the largely successful attempt to crack German radio messages enciphered in the Enigma code.

Independently of this, in the United States, the first electronic digital computer was designed in the late 1930s by Dr. John Atanasoff at Iowa State University. Atanasoff designed his computer to assist graduate students in nuclear physics with their mathematical computations. This prototype and later research were completed quietly and later overshadowed by the development of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) in 1945. ENIAC was granted a patent, which was overturned decades later, in 1973, when the machine was revealed to have incorporated principles first used in the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). The first commercially available electronic computer, UNIVAC I (pictured opposite), was also the first computer to handle both numeric and textual information.

In 1946, Dr John von Neumann of Princeton University proposed the concept of a stored-program computer – a computer whose program was stored in computer memory rather than being set by wires and switches. Von Neumann knew that the data stored in computer memory could easily be changed by a program. He reasoned that programs, too, could be stored in computer memory and changed as required far more easily than connecting wires and setting switches. Von Neumann designed a computer based on this idea. His design was a success and greatly simplified computer programming. The von Neumann architecture is the basis of the digital computer as we know it today.

Mary J. MacDonald, 3 Oct 2005

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