MAC 325 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Grace Hopper, Difference Engine, Analytical Engine
26 Jun 2018
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Week 2-1 Ceruzzi: Inventing Personal Computing Class 2/6/18
Inventing Personal Computing
● Community norms affect how we choose to communicate
● Marking yourself as not knowing community norms diminishes your ability to be
persuasive
○ Outsider
● Analog vs Digital
○ Analog: non-quantified variable; infinite
○ Digital: on or off; finite
● The “Digital Age” (1991-present)
○ Information age; “new media”
○ Networked digital communication
● Mass Media Age (1440-present)
○ Printed books, newspapers, movies, radio, TV
○ One-to-many
○ Broadcast age
■ Subset of mass media age
● Pre-twentieth Century Computing
○ Charles Babbage
■ “Difference engine”
● Automate navigation calculations
○ Analytical engine
■ Successor to difference engine
● Early computing
○ Mid-1930s
○ WWII
■ Computers sparked interest as a way of gaining edge in conflict
● The prominence of women in early computing
○ Grace Hopper “Queen of Software”
■ Mathematics professor
■ Popularized idea of a programming language
■ Flow-matic: first programming language
○ Women dominated to male dominated profession
■ 1. Emergence of professional association
● “Boys club” not welcome to women attending conferences
■ 2. Strict enforcement of new degree requirements
■ 3. Women portrayed negatively in computer industry ads
■ 4. Personality profiles
● Mainframes
○ Mainframe computers enabled by “batch processing”
○ Dartmouth creates “BASIC” in 1964
■ Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
○ Dawn of business computing
