"British Tabulating Machine Company The British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) was a firm which manufactured and sold Hollerith unit record equipment and other data-processing equipment. During World War II, BTM constructed a number of ""bombes"", machines used at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma machine ciphers. The company was formed in 1902 as The Tabulator Limited, after Robert Porter obtained the rights to sell Herman Hollerith's patented machines from the US Tabulating Machine Company (later to become IBM). By 1909, the company had been renamed the ""British Tabulating Machine Company Limited"". In 1920, the company moved from London to"
"the first modern computer, the Analytical Engine created by Charles Babbage. As a result she is often regarded as the first computer programmer. Lovelace was introduced to Babbage's difference engine when she was 17. In 1840, she wrote to Babbage and asked if she could become involved with his first machine. By this time, Babbage had moved on to his idea for the Analytical Engine. A paper describing the Analytical Engine, ""Notions sur la machine analytique"", published by L.F. Menabrea, came to the attention of Lovelace, who not only translated it into English, but corrected mistakes made by Menabrea. Babbage"
"Data Inc. in Montreal, developing industrial remote-control applications. In 1972, AES launched the AES 90 computer, years before Microsoft and Apple were companies. Marketed as a ""word processing system,"" the AES 90 was really the world's first general-purpose personal computer. AES went on to grow to more than $200 million in annual sales. The Word Processor was the precursor to Microsoft Word, Apple and other software based business applications. Dorsey launched his next venture, Micom Co., after selling his stake in AES in 1975, again selling word processing and office automation systems, but adding telecommunications equipment. Having directed Micom to"
"Konrad Zuse Konrad Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, inventor and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the modern computer. Zuse was also noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. He founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943 to 1945 he designed"
"his Analytical Engine. In the late 19th century, Herman Hollerith took the idea of using punched cards to store information a step further when he created a punched card tabulating machine which he used to input data for the 1890 U.S. Census. A large data processing industry using punched-card technology, developed in the first half of the twentieth centurydominated initially by the International Business Machine corporation (IBM), with its line of unit record equipment. The cards were used for data, however, with programming done by plugboards. Some early computers, such as the 1944 IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard Mark"
"was 65 at the time of his death. Roger Sisson Roger Lee Sisson (June 24, 1926 – January 22, 1992) was an early data processing pioneer. Sisson worked on Project Whirlwind while a graduate student at MIT, co-founded the first consulting firm devoted to electronic data processing, and published a number of the earliest books and periodicals on computers and data processing. Sisson earned his M.S. in electrical engineering from MIT in January 1950. He worked in Jay Forrester’s lab on Project Whirlwind. His thesis, written with Alfred Susskind, was on the digital to analog conversion for the cathode ray"
"Douglas Engelbart Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him. In"
"Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (""née"" Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is sometimes regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a ""computing machine"" and the first computer programmer. Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord"
"were programmable, via pegs and cams, to play various rhythms and drum patterns; and the 1801 Jacquard loom could produce entirely different weaves by changing the ""program"" - a series of pasteboard cards with holes punched in them. However, the first computer program is generally dated to 1843, when mathematician Ada Lovelace published an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, intended to be carried out by Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Women would continue to dominate the field of computer programming until the mid 1960s. In the 1880s Herman Hollerith invented the concept of storing ""data"" in machine-readable form."
"Charles Babbage Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Considered by some to be a ""father of the computer"", Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Babbage's analytical engine. His varied work in other fields has led him to be described as ""pre-eminent"" among the many polymaths of his century. Parts of Babbage's incomplete"
"the ""ludicrous treatment of Turing"". Max Newman Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984), generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operational, programmable electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, which produced the world's first working, electronic stored-program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Baby. Max Newman was born Maxwell Herman Alexander Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, to a Jewish family, on 7 February 1897. His father"
"previous human clerks. Since the values stored by digital machines were not bound to physical properties like analog devices, a logical computer, based on digital equipment, was able to do anything that could be described ""purely mechanical."" The theoretical Turing Machine, created by Alan Turing, is a hypothetical device theorized in order to study the properties of such hardware. Charles Babbage is often regarded as one of the first pioneers of computing. Beginning in the 1810s, Babbage had a vision of mechanically computing numbers and tables. Putting this into reality, Babbage designed a calculator to compute numbers up to 8"
"process. The notion of a mechanical calculator for mathematical functions can be traced back to the Antikythera mechanism of the 2nd century BC, while early modern examples are attributed to Pascal and Leibniz in the 17th century. In 1784 J. H. Müller, an engineer in the Hessian army, devised and built an adding machine and described the basic principles of a difference machine in a book published in 1786 (the first written reference to a difference machine is dated to 1784), but he was unable to obtain funding to progress with the idea. Charles Babbage began to construct a small"
"Conway Berners-Lee Conway Maurice Berners-Lee (born 19 September 1921) is an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked as a member of the team that developed the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercial stored program electronic computer. He was born in Birmingham in 1921 and is the father of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Early in World War II Berners-Lee volunteered for the armed services, but was re-directed to university because the government needed people trained in mathematics and electronics. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge in 1940 and read parts I and II of"
"on a design described by Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria. Then in 1672 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented the Stepped Reckoner which he completed in 1694. In 1837 Charles Babbage first described his Analytical Engine which is accepted as the first design for a modern computer. The analytical engine had expandable memory, an arithmetic unit, and logic processing capabilities able to interpret a programming language with loops and conditional branching. Although never built, the design has been studied extensively and is understood to be Turing equivalent. The analytical engine would have had a memory capacity of less than 1 kilobyte of"
"not realized. Johann Helfrich von Müller Johann Helfrich von Müller (January 16, 1746 – 1830) was an engineer in the Hessian army who conceived the difference engine in 1786 (first written reference to the basic principles of a difference machine is dated to 1784), an idea that later evolved into modern computers. In 1784, he was responsible for an improved adding machine based on principles of Leibniz's stepped reckoner. Müller was demonstrably the first who came up with the idea of calculating mathematical tables automatically by a machine. To achieve this, he planned building a printing differential engine. However, this"
"computer program. Around 1885, Herman Hollerith invented the tabulator, which used punched cards to process statistical information; eventually his company became part of IBM. In 1937, one hundred years after Babbage's impossible dream, Howard Aiken convinced IBM, which was making all kinds of punched card equipment and was also in the calculator business to develop his giant programmable calculator, the ASCC/Harvard Mark I, based on Babbage's Analytical Engine, which itself used cards and a central computing unit. When the machine was finished, some hailed it as ""Babbage's dream come true"". During the 1940s, as new and more powerful computing machines"
"numbers using the Analytical Engine. This note is recognized by some historians as the world's first written computer program. In 1936, Alan Turing introduced the Universal Turing machine—a theoretical device that can model every computation that can be performed on a Turing complete computing machine. It is a finite-state machine that has an infinitely long read/write tape. The machine can move the tape back and forth, changing its contents as it performs an algorithm. The machine starts in the initial state, goes through a sequence of steps, and halts when it encounters the halt state. This machine is considered by"
"Commission collected enormous amounts of statistical data, and opened up the problems of storing information for fast access and mechanically searching for data patterns. The pioneer was John Shaw Billings (1838–1913). A senior surgeon in the war, Billings built the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (now the National Library of Medicine), the centerpiece of modern medical information systems. Billings figured out how to mechanically analyze medical and demographic data by turning facts into numbers and punching the numbers onto cardboard cards that could be sorted and counted by machine. The applications were developed by his assistant Herman Hollerith; Hollerith"
"Hank Asher Hank Asher (May 9, 1951 - January 11, 2013) was a businessman best known as ""the father of data fusion."" With a reported fortune of around US$500 million earned as the founder of several data fusion / data mining companies that compile information about companies, individuals and their interrelationships from thousands of different electronic databases. “He’s kind of a legend” among those who use investigative data tools, says Greg Lambert, a legal information specialist. Asher dropped out of school at the age of 16 and worked as a draftsman in a local factory. Later he worked in a"
"Howard H. Aiken Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900 – March 14, 1973) was an American physicist and a pioneer in computing, being the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer. Aiken studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and later obtained his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1939. During this time, he encountered differential equations that he could only solve numerically. Inspired by Charles Babbage's difference engine, he envisioned an electro-mechanical computing device that could do much of the tedious work for him. This computer was originally called the ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) and later"
"Max Newman Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984), generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operational, programmable electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, which produced the world's first working, electronic stored-program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Baby. Max Newman was born Maxwell Herman Alexander Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, to a Jewish family, on 7 February 1897. His father was Herman Alexander Neumann, originally"
"(S.Res.592) was considered, and agreed to without amendment and with a preamble by unanimous consent. The bicentenary of Ada Lovelace's birth was celebrated with a number of events, including: Special exhibitions were displayed by the Science Museum in London, England and the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Library) in Oxford, England. Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (""née"" Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had"
"many strands of modern computing technology. Cliff Shaw John Clifford Shaw (1922–9 February 1991) was a systems programmer at the RAND Corporation. He is a coauthor of the first artificial intelligence program, the Logic Theorist, and was one of the developers of Information Processing Language, a programming language of the 1950s. It is considered the true ""father"" of the JOSS language. One of the most significant events that occurred in the programming was the development of the concept of list processing by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw during the development of the language IPL-V. He invented the"
"business quite separate from the emerging world of the personal computer. The term “word processing” arose from the more general data processing, which since the 1950s had been the standard term used to describe the application of computers to business administration. Through history, there have been 3 types of word processors: mechanical, electronic and software. The first word processing device (a ""Machine for Transcribing Letters"" that appears to have been similar to a typewriter) was patented by Henry Mill for a machine that was capable of ""writing so clearly and accurately you could not distinguish it from a printing press""."
"of the first consulting firms devoted exclusively to electronic data processing, Canning, Sisson, and Associates. Canning and Sisson also published one of the earliest computer periodicals, ""Data Processing Digest"", starting in 1955. Sisson went on to write a number of noted books on the subject of EDP, including ""The Management of Data Processing"", and ""A Manager’s Guide to Data Processing"". He wrote an early and influential paper in the field of Operations Research, ""Methods of Sequencing in Job Shops"" in the journal ""Operations Research"" in 1959. Sisson died January 22, 1992 in New York City, of sudden cardiac arrest. He"
"allowed the storage of binary data. Consequently both worked on the Manchester Baby and on the 21 June 1948, the machine was switched on. Despite its low performance by modern standards – the Baby only had a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words – it was the first computer capable of storing data in the world and was breakthrough in the computer science world. The Baby had provided a feasible design and development began on a more, usable and practical computer in the Manchester Mark 1. Joined by Alan Turing, the university continued development and by October"
"Herman Hollerith Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was an American inventor who developed an electromechanical punched card tabulator to assist in summarizing information and, later, accounting. He was the founder of the Tabulating Machine Company that was amalgamated (via stock acquisition) in 1911 with three other companies to form a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company later renamed IBM. Hollerith is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the development of data processing. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine marks the beginning of the era of semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated"
"Roger Sisson Roger Lee Sisson (June 24, 1926 – January 22, 1992) was an early data processing pioneer. Sisson worked on Project Whirlwind while a graduate student at MIT, co-founded the first consulting firm devoted to electronic data processing, and published a number of the earliest books and periodicals on computers and data processing. Sisson earned his M.S. in electrical engineering from MIT in January 1950. He worked in Jay Forrester’s lab on Project Whirlwind. His thesis, written with Alfred Susskind, was on the digital to analog conversion for the cathode ray tube display. Sisson, with Richard Canning, started one"
"work and to bring attention to the importance of his invention to the digital age. The movie """", which revolves around a world inside a computer system, features a character named Zuse, presumably in honour of Konrad Zuse. German posts DP AG issued a commemorative stamp at this occasion, June 6, 2010: a Zuse portrait, composed solely by the binary code numbers 1 and 0 in fine print. Konrad Zuse Konrad Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, inventor and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional"
"with the latter task often performed by office personnel, in an era when most machines required trained administrators. On its journey from calculators and word processing to serious data processing Wang developed and marketed several lines of small computer system, some of which were WordProcessing-based and some of which were DataProcessing-based. Instead of a clear, linear progression, the product lines overlapped and in some cases borrowed technology from each other. The most identifiable Wang minicomputer performing recognizable data processing was the Wang 2200 which appeared in May 1973. Unlike some other desktop computers such as the HP 9830, it had"
"However, these devices were pure hardware and had no software - their computing powers were directly tied to their specific form and engineering. Software requires the concept of a general-purpose processor - what is now described as a Turing machine - as well as computer memory in which reusable sets of routines and mathematical functions comprising programs can be stored, started, and stopped individually, and only appears recently in human history. The first known computer algorithm was written by Ada Lovelace in the 19th century for her friend and collaborator Charles Babbage's planned Analytical Engine, to translate Luigi Menabrea's work"
"February 20, 2003. Berezin died on December 8, 2018 at the age of 93. Evelyn Berezin Evelyn Berezin (April 12, 1925 – December 8, 2018) was an American computer designer of the first computer-driven word processor. She also worked on computer-controlled systems for airline reservations. Berezin was born in the east Bronx in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, and attended Christopher Columbus High School. She started university at Hunter College in January 1941, studying Economics instead of the Physics she preferred because it was preferred as a subject for women at that time. After WWII started, new"