Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Avant 1900
Les machines à calculer sont utilisées depuis des milliers d'années : on trouvait probablement des
abaques à Babylone en 3000 avant notre ère.
Les Grecs ont fabriqué des calculateurs analogiques très perfectionnés. En 1901, au large de l'île
d'Antikythera, on a découvert une épave dans laquelle se trouvait, encroûté de sel, un assemblage
d'engrenages rouillés (le mécanisme d'Antikythera), daté d'environ 80 avant notre ère, que l'on a
reconstruit : il servait à prédire les mouvements des astres.(D'autres précisions ici.)
L'Ecossais John Napier (1550-1617), l'inventeur des logarithmes, fabriqua vers 1610 les règles de
Napier pour simplifier la multiplication.
En 1641, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) construisit une machine à additionner. Un travail analogue fut
réalisé par Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), qui préconisa l'utilisation du système binaire pour les
calculs. On a récemment découvert que Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), professeur à l'Université de
Tübingen, avait construit une machine de ce genre vers 1623 ou 1624 (avant Pascal et Leibniz), qu'il
décrivit brièvement dans deux lettres à Johannes Kepler. Malheureusement, la machine brûla dans un
incendie, et Schickard lui-même mourut de la peste bubonique en 1635, durant la Guerre de Trente Ans.
Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) inventa un métier à tisser dont les motifs était indiqués par des
cartons perforés. Charles Babbage (1792-1871) construisit deux machines : la machine différentielle,
que l'on peut voir au Science Museum de Londres, et la machine analytique, beaucoup plus ambitieuse
(un précurseur de l'ordinateur), mais aucune des deux ne marchait correctement. (Babbage, que l'un de
ses biographes traite de «génie irascible», était un peu bizarre. On ignore généralement qu'il est
l'inventeur de la dendrochronologie, ou datation des arbres; il ne poursuivit pas ses recherches à ce sujet.
Devenu vieux, il consacra une grande partie de son temps à persécuter les joueurs d'orgue de Barbarie.)
Une amie de Babbage, Ada Byron, comtesse de Lovelace (1815-1852), est parfois considérée comme le
premier programmeur de l'Histoire, en raison d'un rapport qu'elle écrivit sur la machine de Babbage. (Le
langage de programmation Ada a été nommé en son honneur.)
L'économiste et logicien anglais William Jevons (1835-1882) construisit en 1869 une machine à
résoudre des problèmes de logique : «la première machine suffisamment puissante pour résoudre un
problème compliqué plus rapidement qu'à la main» (Martin Gardner). La machine se trouve actuellement
Le statisticien américain Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) inventa la carte perforée moderne pour l'utiliser
dans une machine destinée à analyser les résultats du recensement de 1890.
l'ABC, un calculateur électronique pour résoudre des systèmes d'équations linéaires, mais il ne
fonctionna jamais correctement.
Atanasoff discuta de son invention avec John Mauchly (1907-1980), qui, plus tard, avec John Eckert
(1919-1995), conçut et réalisa l'ENIAC, un calculateur électronique destiné à l'origine aux calculs
balistiques. On ne sait pas très bien quelles idées Atanasoff transmit à Mauchly; le mérite d'avoir inventé
le premier ordinateur revient-il à Atanasoff ou à Mauchly et Eckert ? Ce fut le sujet de batailles
juridiques, c'est encore celui d'un débat historique. L'ENIAC fut construit à l'Université de Pennsylvanie,
et terminé en 1946.
En 1944, Mauchly, Eckert, et John von Neumann (1903-1957) travaillaient à la conception d'un
ordinateur électronique, l'EDVAC. Le premier rapport de Von Neumann sur l'EDVAC eut beaucoup
d'influence; on y trouve de nombreuses idées encore utilisées dans les ordinateurs les plus modernes,
dont une routine de tri par fusion. Eckert et Mauchly reprirent ces idées pour construire l'UNIVAC.
Pendant ce temps, en Allemagne, Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) construisait le premier calculateur
programmable universel (non spécialisé), le Z3 (1941).
En 1945, Vannevar Bush publia As We May Think, un article étonnamment prophétique sur le traitement
de l'information, et ses effets sur la société dans les temps à venir.
En Angleterre, Maurice Wilkes (né en 1913) construisit l'EDSAC (à partir de l'EDVAC). F. Williams (né
en 1911) et son équipe construisirent le Manchester Mark I, dont une version fut opérationnelle dès juin
1948. Certains considèrent cette machine comme le premier ordinateur à programme en mémoire
(architecture dite de Von Neumann).
L'invention du transistor en 1947 par John Bardeen, Walter Brattain et William Shockley transforma
l'ordinateur, et permit la révolution du microprocesseur. Pour cette découverte, ils reçurent le Prix Nobel
de Physique en 1956. (Par la suite, Shockley se rendit célèbre pour ses points de vue racistes.)
Jay Forrester (né en 1918) inventa vers 1949 la mémoire à noyau magnétique.
Les années 50
Grace Hopper (1906-1992) inventa la notion de compilateur (1951). (Quelques années plus tôt, elle avait
trouvé le premier bug de l'histoire de l'informatique, une phalène entrée dans le Mark II de Harvard.)
John Backus et son équipe écrivirent le premier compilateur FORTRAN en avril 1957. LISP (List
Processing), un langage de traitement de listes pour l'intelligence artificielle, fut inventé par John
McCarthy vers 1958. Alan Perlis, John Backus, Peter Naur et leurs associés développèrent Algol
(Algorithmic Language) en 1959.
Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) et Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor) inventèrent
les circuits intégrés en 1959.
Edsger Dijkstra trouva un algorithme efficace pour résoudre le problème des plus courts chemins
dans un graphe, à titre de démonstration pour l'ARMAC en 1956. Il trouva aussi un algorithme efficace
de recherche d'un arbre recouvrant de poids minimal, afin de minimiser le câblage du X1. (Dijkstra est
célèbre pour ses déclarations caustiques et péremptoires; voir par exemple son avis sur quelques langages
de programmation).
Dans un célèbre article de la revue Mind, en 1950, Alan Turing décrivit le test de Turing, l'une des
premières avancées en intelligence artificielle. Il proposait une définition de la «pensée» ou de la
«conscience» relative à un jeu : un examinateur pose des questions par écrit à un interlocuteur situé dans
la pièce voisine, et doit décider, au vu des réponses, si son interlocuteur est une machine ou un être
humain. S'il est incapable de répondre, on peut raisonnablement dire que l'ordinateur «pense».
En 1952, Alan Turing fut arrêté pour outrage aux bonnes moeurs après qu'une plainte pour cambriolage
eut révélé sa liaison avec Arnold Murray. L'homosexualité affichée était tabou dans l'Angleterre des
années 1950, et on obligea Turing à suivre un «traitement» hormonal qui le rendit impuissant et lui fit
pousser des seins. Le 7 juin 1954, Turing se suicida en mangeant une pomme enrobée de cyanure.
On commença aussi à utiliser des méthodes formelles pour prouver la correction des programmes.
Les travaux de Tony Hoare (l'inventeur de Quicksort) jouèrent un rôle important.
En 1979, trois étudiants de Caroline du Nord développèrent un serveur de nouvelles distribué qui
finalement devint Usenet.
En anglais
● History of Computing (Virginia Tech)
● A Brief History of Computer Technology
● Past Notable Women of Computing
● The Machine That Changed the World
● Historic Computer Images
● Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Processing
● Turing Award Winners, 1966-1998
● The Retrocomputing Museum (old programs and programming languages)
● The ENIAC Virtual Museum at the University of Pennsylvania
● COMMPUTERSEUM -- The Commercial Computing Museum (Waterloo, Ontario)
● The Computer Museum (Boston, Massachusetts)
● The Virtual Museum of Computing
● Museum of Obsolete Computers
"Who controls the past commands the future. Who commands the future conquers the past."
-George Orwell
This collection of materials relating to the history of computing is provided courtesy of the Department of
Computer Science at Virginia Tech, and is sponsored in part by a grant from the National Science
Foundation (CDA-9312611).
1968
and
A
new
INDEX
● Introduction
● News
● Conferences and meetings
● Courses
● Overviews of the History of Computing
● People and Pioneers
● Companies and Corporations
● Machines (including a special section on Cryptography)
● Programming Languages
● Calculators
● Computer History Organizations and Museums
● Computing at Institutions
● Archives and Collections
● Publications
● Networks and Internet
● On-line emulators of computers and computing systems
● Miscellaneous
● Women in (the) Computing History
INTRODUCTION
This WWW page is the initiation of a collection of materials related to the history of computing as collected
and written by J. A. N. Lee, until 1995 Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, past
chair of the IEEE Computer Society History of Computing Committee and current chair of the IFIP Working
Group 9.7 (History of Computing). It was original constructed as part of the course materials for the
"Professionalism in Computing" class at Virginia Tech, and in particular as a set of notes and amplification
of the materials in the video "The Machine That Changed The World", developed and distributed
by WGBH (PBS) and the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). We are hoping to expand the coverage of
the video by providing stills for each of the topics in the notes. The best way to access items on this page is
through your browser's find/search facility. An alternative video series is "The Triumph of the Nerds"
that chronicles the development of the PC, starting in the mid-1970s. Information about the series is available
from PBS and summaries are posted as part of a course on M.I.S. Organizations and Technology at Northern
Illinois University.
A collection of materials intended to describe the history of computing to those interested in the 50th
Anniversary of Computing in 1996 was used by students at Virginia Tech to develop a Virtual Museum of
Computing that you may find very interesting.
This list includes several pointers to lists which we have not been able to verify fully. We are VERY aware
that some of these lists contain errors of both fact and date and thus recommend that persons who use them
recognize that they are foremost secondary, if not tertiary sources, and thus should be independently
verified.
The materials included here are intended to assist scholars and students in their work, but the use of the
materials for other publications (other than links from other pages) requires you to get the appropriate
copyright clearance. If you wish to use these materials please send me e-mail
During the Fall semester 1996 and Spring Semester 1997, several students have chosen to partially fulfill the
requirements of our "Professionalism" class by adding additional background material in support of the video
"The Machine That Changed The World" notes. When you find their work, it would be nice if you would
drop them a note to appreciate their work. If there are other classes that have had a similar assignment and
would like to contribute their materials please let me have a URL as soon as possible. Ultimately I would like
to download the material to this site to help preserve the information since student sites tend to disappear
frequently. Thus please put a copyright notice on the page, and a note that permission has been granted to
transfer it to Virginia Tech.
Your comments, thoughts, and possibly contributions, should be sent to me J.A.N. Lee. Links to other pages
are particularly welcome. Several contributors have suggested that I add thumbnails for the portraits and
figures. Regrettably this page has grown so large that it takes a long time for people to download. If I get
time, I will try to separate the page into separate pages for each of the topics in the index and then add
thumbnails. Enjoy the page.
Throughout 1996 I wrote a monthly column for IEEE Computer entitled "looking.back". While each of the
columns was edited for length (and occasionally for content) and the figures removed, the original
submissions are now available, and should be relevent for many years to come!
● January
● February
● March
● April
● May
● June
● July
● August
● September
● October
● Novembere
● December
switch on witch-request@niestu.com
Women in (the) Computing History
In keeping with the tradition of documenting women's history through oral histories, the Women in (the)
Computing History mailing list hopes to augment traditional resources of women's history and histories of
computing by being a repository for women's own stories throughout the history of computing. All women in
computing, too, not just those of us formally schooled in the computing sciences.
The list is open and will be unmoderated so long as the signal rate remains high. If traffic warrants, a digest
option will be made available, but does not currently exist.
We would like to gate this list to other networks. Contact the list owner/maintainer, Donna., at
donna.s@niestu.com to work out gating arrangements. PLEASE DO NOT GATE WITHOUT PERMISSION
FROM THE MAINTAINER FIRST.
To subscribe to Women in (the) Computing History, send the following command to
witch-request@niestu.com in the SUBJECT of e-mail: SUBSCRIBE
To unsubscribe from Women in (the) Computing History, send the following command to
witch-request@niestu.com in the SUBJECT of e-mail: UNSUBSCRIBE
To receive help using SmartList's archive server, send the following command to witch-request@niestu.com
in the SUBJECT of e-mail: ARCHIVE HELP
Owner: Donna donna.s@niestu.com
Use this information at your own risk. For more information and disclaimer send E-mail to
LISTSERV@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU with the command INFO NEW-LIST in the body.
AWARDS
This site has been chosen by "Edu-Activ", an educational resource site based in Germany.
Selected by Länkskafferiet (the Link Larder), the Swedish School net, 15 December 2000.
The favorite site of The Tech Museum of Innovation in May 1998. Tech 10 focuses on high technology for a
Next: 3.1 The Mechanical Era Up: OV Chapter Previous: 2 Computational Science Computer
A complete history of computing would include a multitude of diverse devices such as the ancient
Chinese abacus, the Jacquard loom (1805) and Charles Babbage's ``analytical engine'' (1834). It would
also include discussion of mechanical, analog and digital computing architectures. As late as the 1960s,
mechanical devices, such as the Marchant calculator, still found widespread application in science and
engineering. During the early days of electronic computing devices, there was much discussion about the
relative merits of analog vs. digital computers. In fact, as late as the 1960s, analog computers were
routinely used to solve systems of finite difference equations arising in oil reservoir modeling. In the end,
digital computing devices proved to have the power, economics and scalability necessary to deal with
large scale computations. Digital computers now dominate the computing world in all areas ranging from
the hand calculator to the supercomputer and are pervasive throughout society. Therefore, this brief
sketch of the development of scientific computing is limited to the area of digital, electronic computers.
The evolution of digital computing is often divided into generations. Each generation is characterized by
dramatic improvements over the previous generation in the technology used to build computers, the
internal organization of computer systems, and programming languages. Although not usually associated
with computer generations, there has been a steady improvement in algorithms, including algorithms
used in computational science. The following history has been organized using these widely recognized
generations as mileposts.
verena@csep1.phy.ornl.gov
Back to TA P
[1]
This site was chosen for a Look Smart Award in January 1997
Index
1. Great Brains
2. Inventing the Future
3. The Paperback Computer
4. The Thinking Machine
5. The World At Your Fingertips
6. A post-viewing Scavenger Hunt!
The following "slides" outline the major topics of presentation in each of the episodes of the video series
The Machine That Changed the World which was produced by WGBH Television in Boston MA, in
cooperation with the British Broadcasting Corp., with support from ACM, NSF and UNISYS.
There is a book which accompanied the series that you may want to reference:
Palfreman, Jon, and Doron Swade. The Dream Machine: Exploring the Computer Age, BBC Books,
London, 1991, 208 pp.
For more links to the history of computing pages click here.
We would appreciate receiving suggestions for additional links from this page to other pages that amplify
the topics covered in this video series, or provide "side-bar" information on topics that were, of necessity,
omitted from the show. Please send me e-mail. We also encourage teachers to give homework
assignments that would result in the development of web pages that could be added to this site. This is
particularly important for the last two episodes!. Remember that this video series were originally
broadcast in 1991 and in the intervening years many things have happened in the computer business --
the World Wide Web for one! So if there are things we need to bring up-to-date, perhaps we can do it
through the medium of this Web page rather than attempting to redo the original video.
department here at Virginia Tech! An excellent story on Jack also appeared in the Roanoke Times.
The ENIAC was 50 years old in 1996. The University of Pennsylvania put on a series of events during
the year and established a WWW Home Page to keep you abreast of developments. It is intended that
this page will also include a simulation of the ENIAC.
Eckert to be invalid, stating that the inventor of the computer was "One, John Vincent Atanasoff".
Another missing person is Grace Murray Hopper. Dr. Hopper was perhaps the first modern woman to be
involved in computers (Ada King, Countess of Lovelace possibly being the first in the 19th century). She
started work for Howard Aiken in 1943 on the Harvard Mark I Calculator (also called the IBM ASCC).
Sunsequently she became deeply involved in the development of high level languages for computers,
creating the concept of a compiler, and two early languages. She was highly influential in the
development of COBOL and its usage in military installations. She became the highest ranking female
Navy person of her time (Rear Admiral) and a role model to thousands of young women. She is perhaps
best known for her discovery of the first computer bug in the Harvard Mark II computer. The bug now
resides at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, photograph courtesy of the Apple Computer Company, through the
WGBH new release on this video. See also "The Triumph of the Nerds" and a biography of Steven
Wozniak by Manish Srivastava.
Blue Boxes - Personal Computers
Lee Felsenstein - IBM 5100
IBM PC - 1981
Macintosh - 1984
Macintosh computer interface
Environments
Users
The first spreadsheet by Dan Bricklin Lotus 1,2,3 - Mitch Kapor
Microsoft - Bill Gates (an early history by John Mirick and a biography by Stacey Reitz.)
Sesame Street
Handicapped - Assistive Technology; an article by Christopher R. Murphy (CS 3604, Spring 1997)
Chained computers
New Projections
Illusions
Virtual Reality: (Two articles by Scott Tate and Keith Mitchell, CS 3604, Fall 1996.)
Henry Fuchs - UNC
Fred Brooks, Jr.
"Idiot savants."
Early 1970s - story understanding via scripts and frames. (Minsky.)
Modeling commonsense. (Children possess broad and shallow knowledge. People learn by extending the
fringe of what they already know, therefore computers make bad pupils as they lack "basic knowledge.")
1984 - Lenat's ten-year CYC project to catalogue "commonsense." (Create an encyclopedia of
commonsense basic knowledge.)
A new look at modeling intelligence by modeling the biological brain.
1950s and 1960s - Perceptrons. (an article by Michele Estebon, CS 3604, 1997).
Late 1970s - Neural networks; Connectionists.
Self-driven vehicle - "trained" to drive.
Selective training - tank recognition failure.
NetTalk.
Large networks require large training times.
Brain - a collection of special purpose machines --> general intelligence/ commonsense.
A.I. - history of fascinating failures.
Rapid development of computers. (Forty-five years ago: ENIAC; $3,000,000 cost; believed only ever six
needed. Now: millions of cheap computers; interconnected.)
Print media --> Digital media. (More options for indexing and searching.)
450 books on one CD.
Digital world vs. analog "real world." (Patterns of digital pulses; 1 and 0.)
Real world digitized into digital form - permanence; no degradation. (Digitized picture cannot age;
perfect memory.)
Digitized information amenable to rapid transmission. (Information sent down wires at the speed of
light.)
Global communications lead to shrinking world - disappearance of "place" as an attribute.
Physical presence vs. "electronic presence" --> new forms of social interaction.
Global communities - distance no longer an obstacle. (Financial traders part of global financial
community - physically separate but part of the same "community.")
Stock market. (As many trades in a day as it used to be in a week.)
Increase of information travel rate.
Timeliness of information.
London Stock Exchange - physical "marketplace" rendered redundant.
New social gatherings - linked by common interest, not geography.
Internet and USENET - new forum for exchange of ideas.
Cold fusion - quicker interchange of ideas via USENET news than possible via existing journals.
SeniorNet - computer networks entering everyday lives.
Electronic presence. (Left by electronic traces we leave behind as part of our day to day lives. Constant
information gathering.)
Data pollution - wrong information propagated between computers and databases. (Disrupts thousands of
lives per year.)
Invasion of privacy - casual information gathering can give rise to distorted views of individuals.
Electronic sweat shops.
Technological evolution outpacing social evolution. (Alvin Toffler, "Future Shock.")
1987 Stock Market crash. ("Programmed selling" instigated avalanche of selling leading to 508 point
crash.)
Speed of light as a constraint.
Effect on stability of social systems.
Singapore - developed nation status via transformation into an "information society."
"Digitization" of Singapore - Land Data Hub. (Database on all aspects of Singapore; complete electronic
record.)
Singapore - total electronic efficiency.
Social engineering and control of people vs. tool for democracy.
MINITEL - large growth from one to 12,000 choices.
1986 - Student protests against admissions policies successfully coordinated via MINITEL.
The future is digital!
Dependence upon computers.
Computers programmed in "craftsmanlike" manner.
Software errors - no reliable engineering techniques for the production of software.
Software bugs - human consequences; Therac-25 radiation machine software malfunction.
AT&T telephone system crash caused by a single line of bad code. (Bug causes 20,000,000 phone calls
being unable to connect and cripples phone network.)
Untestability of large software systems.
1989 - Dallas Fort Worth airport computer failure.
Unlike traditional engineering, small errors can completely cripple entire software systems.
Wheel turns full circle: Babbage's inspiration stemmed from the desire to eliminate errors. However,
computers are still prone to errors via programmers, as in Babbage's time.
Communication central to digital future.
Uses of computers different from original goals.
Computer a medium, not a machine.
● It has come the ability to circumvent the established telephone systems by the use of the Internet
and the WWW. This raises the question of the "Internet Telecommunications Software: Need to
Grow or Need to Pay?" by Jacob Chuh, CS 3604, Fall 1996.
● Supercomputers were in vogue in 1990, but they were not part of the video series. One of the key
persons (some will say THE key person) in the development of modern supercomputers was
Seymour Cray. Cray died as a result of a traffic accident in 1996.
Computer Trivia:
A good source of computer trivia is the Annual ACM/Computer Museum Computer Bowl. The questions
and answers to several year's questions have been published in the Communications of the ACM. The
1994 set were included in the August 1994 issue of ACMemberNet.
[1] The video tape series entitled "The Machine That Changed
The World" is no longer available for purchase, but information
about copies can be obtained from the Association for
Computing Machinery (one of the original sponsors of the
series).
There is no web site or e-mail address available as of 96/10/02.