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Computer History page 1 Today, you're going to learn about the fascinating chain of events that led to the birth of the modern personal computer. As you work your way through this lesson and those that follow, you'll gain an intimate understanding of personal computer hardware. Before we begin, please allow me to define a word that will prove to be very significant: the word hardware. Hardware: Device(s) specifically designed to carry out one or more of the following activities:
This definition is not mine. It was actually developed by a gifted British writer, working in concert with an equally gifted mathematician, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The mathemetician, a brilliant inventor named Charles Babbage, was an eccentric sort. He was known to spend his evenings poring over marine navigation charts, looking for mathematical errors. When he spotted a mistake, he'd dash a vehement letter off to the Royal Astronomical Society of London, chastising them for their carelessness. Babbage gained notoriety when he brought suit against London's organ grinders, in an attempt to have them banned from the city. When Babbage's suit was thrown out of court, organ grinders from all over London made a point to congregate nightly just underneath the hapless mathemetician's bedroom window. Some say Babbage was driven to the brink of madness by the cacophonous twilight concerts that resulted. Babbage worked closely with Ada Augusta of Lovelace, daughter of the great Romantic poet Lord Byron. Lovelace must have inherited her father's gift for words, because she was a very powerful technical writer.
At the conclusion of the input procedure, the analytical engine would shuttle both the numbers and the mathematical instructions to a place Lovelace called the mill. The numbers inside the mill would then be subjected to the precise sequence of mathematical operations prescribed earlier by the user's instructions.
After a bit of huffing and puffing, the mill would obtain an answer. This answer would then be output (supplied) to the user.
Babbage labored on his analytical engine from 1834 to 1842, but was unable to produce a machine with the capabilities he envisioned. Unfortunately, the technology of the time simply wasn't ready (and the organ grinder-induced sleeplessness didn't help much, either). Babbage and Lovelace were clearly ahead of their time. Although they failed to produce the machine they envisioned, their ideas served as a remarkably accurate blueprint for the modern-day personal computer.
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Although simple calculating machines were fairly commonplace at the time, the mathematician and the writer talked endlessly of building something no inventor had yet dreamed up--a complicated device they called an Analytical Engine. As Lovelace described it, a user would feed a series of mathematical instructions into the analytical engine. The machine would then hold these instructions in a place Lovelace called the storehouse, or store for short. Later, the operator could input (provide) a series of numbers, which the machine would also hold in the store.
