Research Paper Appendix A (Short general computing history) - Tally Sticks to Hollerith punched cards

The history of computing and pre-computing devices sprang out of people’s rather natural need to count, and to manipulate numerical counts. Throughout the history, devices gained increasing complexity, and eventually became electronic and binary-based, as the computers we know today are. (although mechanical/digital was an important step in the process.)

Some of the first counting instruments people used (besides their fingers and toes) were tally sticks. These were pieces of bone with nicks cut in them, indicating the counting. Examples have been dated to prehistory, and they include the element of a human input being recorded, albeit directly and nonmechanically.

The abacus, well known as a rack of beads used for arithmetic, first started showing up in Babylonia (modern-day Middle East) around 2400 BC. These added to the aspect of storage that could be changed. (However, the result ‘displayed’ by the storage would have to be erased in order to perform a new operation.)

Around 500 BC Indians (as in those of the Asian subcontinent) were some of the first to come up with the concept of zero and discuss it, a rather important part of “ones and zeroes.” Also, around that same time, an Indian mathematician named Pingala was the first to discuss the binary system. Although he used the concept of a short syllable and a long symbol, as opposed to using the symbols ‘0’ and ‘1’, binary is such an important concept of computing, and ofrograms in particular, that this is not to be overlooked.

In 724, a Chinese by the name of Liang-Ling Can developed a fully mechanical clock, as opposed to water clocks which had been in use before. This is important because some of the machines that were a precursor to computers were mechanical devices that drew heavily from mechanical clocks.

A major next step came in 1614 with Napier’s Bones. These are named for their creator, John Napier, a Scottish mathematician. They involve a vertical strip for each single-digit number, printed with that number’s multiples. Each ‘Napier’s bone’ has ten sections, showing its number multiplied by each single-digit number in descending order down the strip. (Double-digit results are separated by a diagonal slash.) If you put the strips for the digits of the number you want to work with onto a special board, you can perform certain mathematical calculations.

Here, you have standardized parts “program modules” that can be combined into a set of instructions. (the multi-digit number you want to work with.) However, the parts that compose a Napier’s Bones “program” are limited to the single-digit numbers, and human work is still necessary to process the results (although less work than just doing the calculations from scratch.) Of course, it is nonmechanical.

In 1623 Wilhem Schickard, a German, invented a purely mechanical calculator, but it was still based on digital (base-10) as opposed to binary (base-2), and it handled relatively small numbers.

Another notable German mathematician, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, came up with two important developments in this field. He may be better known for developing calculus around the same time as, and independently of, Issac Newton. But in 1671, he developed the Stepped Reckoner, which could perform all arithmetic operations, especially very large multiplication. (twelve-digit numbers times five-digit numbers) Leibniz also produced a modern, refined version of the binary-number system.

Perhaps the first mechanical programmable device came in 1801. In that year, a Frenchman by the name of Joseph-Marie Jacquard finalized an automatic loom – a loom controlled by punch cards. The loom wove different complex patterns depending on what was on the punch card. This is a very important innovation because a machine (the loom) behaved differently when it was fed different weaving instruction cards, much like a computer behaving differently when it’s fed different programs.

Joseph Henry invented the electromechanical relay in 1851, and Lee De Forest invented the Electronic Tube / Electric Valve in 1906, the latter leading to the transistor of 1947. These were all important milestones in the transition of computers from mechanical devices to digital/electronic devices.

In 1890, Herman Hollerith’s then new punchcard-based system was used for the 1890 U.S. Census. An advantage of computing was show in the fact that the 1890 Census took only six weeks to tabulate, as opposed to more than six years for the 1880 Census. Furthermore, the 1890 Census was able to include and analyze a wider range of data.