NATS 1700 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: John Vincent Atanasoff, Clifford Berry, Maurice Wilkes

• School: York University
• Department: Natural Science
• Course: NATS 1700
• Professor: Dov Lungu

Document Summary

Developed over 2000 years ago by the chinese. A manual device to make everyday calculations easier: calculus (latin) = pebble, keeps track of sums, carries, etc. First in a long line and devices and machines developed during the century to enable calculations. Came when charles babbage was frustrated looking over calculations. Said he wanted a machine to do it powered by steam. The o(cid:374)l(cid:455) (cid:449)a(cid:455) to (cid:271)uild those (cid:862)e(cid:374)gi(cid:374)es(cid:863) the(cid:374) (cid:449)as (cid:271)(cid:455) usi(cid:374)g rods a(cid:374)d gears a(cid:374)d the(cid:455) (cid:449)ere (cid:374)e(cid:448)er made to work. They were meant to be powered by steam ! 1823: babbage started work on the difference engine: to mass produce astronomical tables quickly and accurately, astronomical tables were used to calculate planetary positions, lunar phases, eclipses and calendrical information, their computation and printing was to be automated. A special-purpose calculating machine that could perform multi-step operations based on the results of previous computations: ordinary arithmetic calculating machines could only carry out individual calculations.