History of computer documentary
Hardly anything defines modern life better than the computer. Whether we like it or not, computers have infiltrated every aspect of our society. Today computers do much more than simply compute. For instance: supermarket scanners calculate our bill while keeping store inventory, computerized telephone switching centers play traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of communication untangled, and ATM’s let us conduct banking transactions from virtually anywhere in the world. But where did all this technology come from and where is it heading? To fully understand and appreciate the impact computers have on our lives and promises they hold for the future, it is important to understand their evolution.
The real beginnings of computers start with an English mathematics professor, Charles Babbage. Frustrated at many errors he found while examining calculations for the Royal Astronomical Society, he declared, "I wish to God these calculations had been performed by steam!" With those words, the automation of computers had begun. By 1812, Babbage noticed a harmony between machines and mathematics: machines were best at performing tasks repeatedly without mistake, while mathematics often required a repetition of steps. The problem was applying the ability of machines to the needs of mathematics. Babbage's first attempt was in 1822 when he proposed a machine to perform differential equations, called a Difference Engine. It was powered by steam and large as a locomotive. The machine would have a stored program and could perform calculations and print the results automatically. After working on the Difference Engine for ten years, Babbage was suddenly inspired to begin work on the first general-purpose computer, which he called the Analytical Engine. Babbage's assistant, Augusta Ada King, daughter of poet Lord Byron, was instrumental in the machine's design. One of the few people who understood the Engine's design as well as Babbage, she helped revise plans, secure funding from the British government, and tell the specifics of the Analytical Engine to the public. Also, Lady Lovelace's understanding of the machine allowed her to create the instruction routines to be fed into the computer, making her the first female computer programmer.
The steam-powered Engine may seem primitive by today's standards, but it outlined the basic elements of a modern general-purpose computer and was a breakthrough concept. Consisting of over fifty-thousand components, the basic design of the Analytical Engine included input devices in the form of perforated cards that contained operating instructions and a "store" for memory of a thousand numbers of up to fifty decimal digits long. It also contained a "mill" with a control unit that allowed processing instructions in any sequence, and output devices to produce printed results. Babbage borrowed the idea of punch cards to encode the machine's instructions from the Jacquard loom. The loom used punched boards that controlled the patterns to be woven.
In 1889, an American inventor, Herman Hollerith, also applied the loom concept to computing. His first task was to find a faster way to compute the U.S. census. The previous census had taken nearly seven years to count and with a constantly growing population, they feared it would take ten years to count the latest census. Hollerith's method used cards to store data information, which he fed into a machine that compiled the results. Each punch on a card represented one number, and combinations of two punches represented one letter. As many as eighty variables could be stored on a single card. Instead of ten years, census takers had their results in just six weeks. The punch cards also served as a storage method for data and they helped reduce computational errors. Hollerith brought his punch card reader into the business world, founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, which later became IBM. Both business and government used punch cards for data processing until the 1960's.
With the onset of the World War II, governments sought to develop computers to exploit their potential strategic importance. This increased funding for computer development projects sped up technical progress. By 1941, German engineer Konrad Zuse developed the Z3 to design airplanes and missiles. The allied forces, however, made greater advances. In 1943, the