THINKING MACHINES: THE CREATION OF THE COMPUTER

How much did Herman Hollerith eventually sell all the shares in his tabulating company for?

$1,000,000+

Charles Babbage's genius was said to be how many years ahead of his time?

100

How much time would pass before ideas for a programmable computation device would again be conceived?

100 years

How long did it take his machines to tally the population count of 62,622,250 for that census?

10x faster, took six weeks

In the second half of the 19th century, America's growth as an industrial power and the resulting immigration caused America's population to increase 35% each decade. This created a need for better ways to take the census every ten years, which was a constitutional requirement. In which census, or decade, was a contest staged t o se how the census data could be tabulated much faster?

1890

How much of Babbage's mechanical computing machines were finished by the time he died?

A small portion

Why did the government pull the plug on Babbage?

Even though the machine worked perfectly, it was only part of what was promised and was too expensive

Distinguish between hardware and software.

Hardware comes in boxes and are the physical parts, such as a monitor. Software comes on disks and are the instructions telling the computer what to do.

What former "humorless" MIT instructor used a device that read punched cards?

Herman Hollerith

What two sources of revenue did Babbage use to begin building his device?

His own funds and those from the government

How did Babbage demonstrate his brilliance in mathematics while he was at Trinity College?

In 1820, he found errors in the Royal Astronomical Society

Who is often called the world's first programmer because of descriptions written about the Analytical Engine?

Lady Ada of Lovelace

Whose writings contain much of what we know about the workings of Babbage's machines?

Lady Ada of Lovelace

What were some of the difficulties Babbage encountered when he began building his machine?

Mechanical machine shops weren't specialized enough to make such precise parts as needed, so Babbage had to make better machine tools as well

What is MIPS?

Millions of Instructions Per Second, a measure of computer power

Who worked with the table figures and what were they called?

People who specialized in mathematical computation (computers)

Once Babbage finished part of the Difference Engine, how well did it work?

Perfectly!

Another reason Babbage lost his support was because his interest turned away from finishing his original plan to another designed he developed. What did he call this 'vastly superior' new machine?

The Analytical Engine

What did Babbage call the machine that he designed to calculate the tables and print the results?

The Difference Engine

Who were some of Babbage's enemies and why?

The London organ grinders as Babbage kept telling them to shut up so he may focus

What was the name of the company Herman Hollerith initially set up for business?

The Tabulating Machine Co.

What industry proved to be an even greater challenge for Hollerith and nearly wiped him out?

The railroads

What was wrong with the tables computers managed?

They were full of errors

At the age of 43, Babbage had a vision he would pursue for the rest of his life. List the components of this machine that are analogous to the modern computer as we know it: the heart of the machine which did the ________ was called the ______ and was much like the CPU of today's computers. An oblong structure called the _______ called the _________ held numbers to be used in the calculations, like modern computer ________. Instructions and numbers could be fed into the machine using ______________ _________________.

calculations; mill; CPU; store; memory; punch cards

Although computers are enormously intricate, their most basic components consist of

simple devices that can be turned on/off

During the Industrial Revolution (early 19th century), the maturing fields of engineering, navigation, surveying, finance, and science and their practical application in commerce relied on volumes and volumes of

tables for trigonometry, tides, gravity, infastrate, multiplication, etc.

"Simply put," a computer does three things:

take information, process it, and output the result