Charles Babbage: Father of modern digital computers

The earliest device that qualifies as a digital computer is the “abacus” also known as “soroban”. Abacus is the simplest form of a digital computer.

The device permits the users to represent numbers by the position of beads on a rack. The first mechanical adding machine was invented by French Mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642. The machine became very popular and was produced on mass scale.

Charles Babbage, nineteenth century Professor at Cambridge University, is considered to be the father of modern digital computers. He was born on 26 December 1791 in his father’s house in Walworth, Surrey. 

During his period, mathematical and statistical tables were prepared by a group of clerks. Even the utmost care and precaution could not eliminate human errors.

Babbage had to spend several hours checking these tables. Soon he became dissatisfied and exasperated with this type of monotonous job.

The result was that he started thinking to build a machine which could compute tables guaranteed to be effort-free.

In this process, Babbage designed a “Difference Engine” in the year 1822 which could produce reliable tables.

In 1842, Babbage came out with his new idea of Analytical Engine that was intended to be completely automatic. It is for his effort that he is today know as the ‘Father of Modern Digital Computer’.

It was to be capable of performing the basic arithmetic functions for any mathematical problem and it was to do so at an average speed of 60 additions per minute. His Engine could evaluate algebraic expression correctly and was also able to produce mathematical and statistical tables correct up to 20 digits.

The Engine had five components:
*A storage unit that held the numbers
*An arithmetic unit called Mill, to perform the arithmetic calculations
*A control unit that controlled the activities of the computer
*An input device that gave the numbers and instructions to the computer
*An output device that displayed the result

Unfortunately, he was unable to produce a working model of this machine mainly because the precision engineering required to manufacturer the machine was not available during that period.

However, his effort established a number of principles which have been shown to be fundamental to the design of any computer.

Dr. Howard Aiken of Harvard University in association with IBM developed a large scale electro-mechanical computer in 1944. The computer nicknamed ‘Mark I’ was based on the concept of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
Charles Babbage: Father of modern digital computers

Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Heafield Hamilton was born on August 17 1936 in Paoli, Indiana.  After receiving her undergraduate degree in mathematics, she married and taught math and French in public school while her husband completed college.

After the couple moved to Boston, Hamilton planed to enroll in graduate school, but obtained a job at MIT as a programmer for a professor doing meteorological prediction and statistical long-range weather forecasting.

Hamilton worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 to do programming for another metrological professor. She wrote the computer code for the moon-bound spacecraft. In her study of software developed for these missions,

Hamilton tracked a variety of causes of software error – most notably interface errors. Hamilton popularized the term ‘software engineering’ and developed several aspects of today’s computing machines, such as the concept of asynchronous software, priority scheduling or end-to-end testing.
Margaret Hamilton

John Louis von Neumann (1903-1957)

The mathematician John von Neumann made important contributions of many areas of mathematics and quantum physics before turning to computers and developing the theoretical foundations of digital electronic computers.

Von Neumann was born to an aristocratic family on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. He was the eldest of three sons born to Margaret von Neumann and Max von Neumann, successful banker.

At the age of 18, von Neumann had his first mathematical paper published with M.Fekete, his tutor. This paper showed how to solve a problem on the location zeroes of certain minimal polynomials.

 In 1921 von Neumann commenced study of mathematics at the University of Budapest and at the University of Berlin and in 1925 he received his degree in chemical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich.

 In 1926 he earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, where he wrote his dissertation on set theory. During the 1920s, while von Neumann was in Europe, he focused his works in two main areas: ‘set theory and logical foundations of mathematics’, and ‘Hilbert space theory, operator theory and the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics’. On top of that he successfully gained a reputation of his work on set theory and quantum mechanics especially the theory of measurement.

The von Neumann minimax theorem was proved in 1928 and was major millstone in the theory of games, von Neumann continued to think about game and wrote the classic Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (written with economist Oskar Morgenstern) in 1944.

Von Neumann spent the rest of his career at Princeton University, first as a visiting professor, then as a professor of mathematics at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study from 1933 until his early death in 1957.

During World War II, the need for advanced computing technology increased within various military research programs. Von Neumann also participated n these research programs as a consultant and he got involved in aerodynamics, high explosives, atomic bombs, electronics, the development of high-speed calculating machine, etc.

von Neumann was a gregarious man with sophisticated tastes, a command of four languages, a prodigious memory, and an amazing ability to perform calculation in his head. He died February 8, 1957 in Washington, DC of brain cancer.
John Louis von Neumann (1903-1957)