Tips N Tricks For PC

          The history of computers and computing is of special significance to us, because many of its most important events have occurred within our life-time. Historians divide the history of the modern computer into generations, beginning with the introduction of the UNIVAC I, the first commercially viable computer, in 1951. But the quest for a mechanical servant--one that could free people from the more boring aspects of thinking—is centuries old. Why did it take so long to develop the computer? Some of the “credit” goes to human foibles. Too often brilliant insights were not recognized or given adequate support during on inventor’s lifetime. Instead, these insights would lay dormant for as long as 100 years until someone else rediscovered—them. Some of the “credit” has to go to workers, too, who sabotaged labor-saving devices that threatened to put them out to work. The rest of the “credit” goes to technology; some insights were simply ahead of their time’s technology history of the stops and starts that have given us this marvel of the modern age, the computer.

3000 B.C.: The Abacus:-
The Abacus is probably considered the original mechanical counting device (it has been traced back 5000 years). It is still used in education to demonstrate the principles of counting and arithmetic and in business for speedy calculations.

1623-1662: Blaise Pascal:-
Although inventor, painter, and sculptor Leonardo da Vinci (1425–1519) sketched ideas for a mechanical adding machine, it was another 150 years before French Mathematician and Philosopher Blaise Pascal finally invented and built the “Pascaline” in 1642 to help his father, a tax collector. Although Pascal was praised throughout Europe, his invention was a financial failure. The hand–built machines were expensive and delicate; moreover, Pascal was the only person who could repair them. Because human labor was actually cheaper, the Pascaline was abandoned as impractical.

1642: The Pascaline:-

The Pascaline used a counting-wheel design. Numbers for each digit were arranged on wheels so that a single revolution of one wheel would engage gears that turned the wheel one tenth of a revolution to its immediate left. Although the Pascaline was abandoned as impractical, its counting-wheel design was used by all mechanical calculators until the mid-1960s, when they were made absolute by electronic calculation.

1793–1817: Charles Babbage:-
Everyone from bankers to navigators depended on mathematical tables during the busting Industrial Revolution. However, these hand-calculated tables were usually full of errors. After discovering that his own tables were riddled with mistakes, Charles Babbage envisioned a steam-powered “differential engine” and then an “analytical engine” that would perform tedious calculations accurately. Although Babbage never perfected his devices, they introduce many of the concepts used in today’s general purpose computer.

1842: Baggage’s Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine:-
Convinced his machine would benefit England, Babbage applied for – and received –one of the first government grants to build the difference engine. Hampered by nineteenth –century machine technology, cost overruns, and the possibility his chief engineer was padding the bills, Babbage completed only a portion of the difference engine (shown here) before the government withdrew its support in 1842, deeming the project “worthless to science.” Meanwhile, Babbage had conceived of the idea of a more advanced “analytical engine”. In essence, this was a general-purpose computer that could add, subtract, multiply and divide in automatic sequence at a rate of 60 additions per second. His 1833 design, which called for thousands of gears and drives, would, cover the area of a football field and be powered by a locomotive engine. Baggage worked on this project until his death. In 1991 London’s Science Museum spent $600,000 to build a working model of the difference engine, using Babbage’s original plans. The result stands 6 feet high, 10 feet long, contains 4000 parts, and weighs 3 tons.

1801: Jacquard’s Loom:-

A practicing weaver, Frenchman Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1753–1871) spent what little spare time he had trying to improve the lot of his fellow weavers. (They worked 16 hour days, with no days off!) His solution, the Jacquard loom, was created in 1801. Holes strategically punched in a card directed the movement of needles, thread, and fabric, creation the elaborate patterns still known as Jacquard weaves. Jacquard’s weaving loom is considered the first significant use of binary automation. The loom was on immediate success with mill owners because they could hire cheaper and less skilled workers. But weavers, fearing unemployment, rioted and called Jacquard a traitor.

1816–1852: Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace:-

The daughter of poet Lord Byron, Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace become a mentor to Babbage and translated his works, adding her own extensive footnotes. Her suggestion that punched cards could be prepared to instruct Babbage’s engine to repeat certain operation has led some people to call her the First Programmer. Ada, the programming language adopted by the Department of Defense as a standard, is named for Lady Ada Lovelace.

1860–1929: Herman Hollerith:-
With the help of a professor, Herman Hollerith got a job as a special agent helping the US Bureau of the Census tabulate the head count for the 1880 census–a process that look almost eight years. To speed up the 1890 census, Hollerith devised a punched-card tabulation machine. When his machine out performed two other systems, Hollerith won a contract to tabulate the 1890 census. Hollerith earned a handsome income leasing his machinery to the governments of the United States, Canada, Austria, Russia and others; he charged 65 cents for every 1000 people counted. (During the 1890 U.S. census alone, he earned more than $40,000 – a fortune in those days.) Hollerith may have earned even more selling the single-use punched cards. But the price was worth it. The bureau completed the census in just 21/2 years and saved more than $5 million.

1890: Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine:-
 

Hollerith’s punched-card tabulating machine had three parts. Clerks at the U.S. Bureau of the Census used a hand punch to enter data into cards a little larger than a dollar bill. Cards were then read and sorted by a 24-bin sorter box (right on the picture) and summarized on numbered tabulating dials (left on the picture), which were connected electrically to the sorter box. Ironically, Hollerith’s idea for the punched card came not from Jacquard or Babbage but from “punch photography”. Railroads of the day issued tickets with physical descriptions of a passenger’s hair and eye color matched those of the ticket owner. From this, Hollerith got the idea of making a punched “photograph” of every person to be tabulated.

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