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Wilhelm Schikard: The Calculating Clock
Wilhelm designed this machine with his friend Johannes Kepler in mind, because he described how it could be used to calculate astronomical tables. The machine could add and subtract 6-digit numbers via a series of gears and would ring a bell if there was an overflow of data. Napier's bones could be mounted to the machine to calculate more complex equations -
Ada Byron: The First Computer Programmer
Ada Byron, daughter of the famous Lord Byron, was well versed in mathematics and programming. She wrote a report on Charles Babbage's Analytics Machine, which was considered the first general purpose computer and used punch cards for input/output. Byron essentially wrote the first computer program and realized that computers have the ability to manipulate any data represented by numbers. She predicted the machines could be used to print graphics and compose music. -
Herman Hollerith: Tabulating Machine
Herman Hollerith is considered the father of automatic computing. He used punch cards to store data and invented the first tabulating and sorting machine. He used his invention to calculate the 1890 census, which reduced a process that took years down to just a few months. Statistical data was stored in non-conducting paper and was read my counters fixed with electro-magnets. -
E. O. Carissan: The Factoring Machine
Eugene Carissan, an officer in the French infantry, built a machine that could factor whole numbers at a much faster rate than humans. The device consists of 14 rings mounted on rollers, with gears underneath and equally spaced steel studs screwed on top. The user has to cap studs on each ring and divide by numbers smaller than the given number. The rings rotate at different rates, and if all rings with capped studs brush against an armature, a click sounds and the number given is the answer. -
Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley: The Transistor
The transistor was built in response to the shortcomings of the vacuum tube, it used up too much power, created too much heat, and were overall unreliable. After a lot of experimentation with gold, silicon, water and germanium, Bardeen and Brattain finally built a model that worked. The point-contact transistor used strips of gold on a plastic triangle, pushed into contact with a slab of germanium. The whole process used semiconductors to amplify signals due to its sensitivity to electrons. -
John Backus: FORTRAN
John Backus and other employees at IBM worked to design a programming system that would allow a computer to produce its own machine language programs. FORTRAN is essentially the grandfather of high level programming languages and is still widely used to this day. FORTRAN is specifically designed for numerical and scientific computations, like physics and engineering. Today, FORTRAN has been modified to encompass modern coding such as array programming. -
Devol and Engelberger: UNIMATE
UNIMATE was the first mass-produced industrial robot and was used by General Motors for welding and handling hot die castings. By following programming instructions located in a drum attached to the robot, the arm could work in six axes of motion and could work with loads of up to 500 pounds relatively quickly. -
Feigenbaum and Lerdberg: DENDRAL
DENDRAL is a form of artificial intelligence whose primary goal was to study hypotheses and lead to scientific discoveries. It was specifically used by organic chemists to identify unknown complex molecules using chemistry databases. The DENDRAL system used heuristics to calculate its data. It's considered an expert system because it automates the decision/problem-solving processes of chemists. -
Ralph Baer: The Brown Box
Ralph Baer designed the Brown Box with American consumers in mind, he wanted to market the idea of playing games on a television set. The Brown Box could play a variety of games, including ping pong, checkers, four sports games, a shooting game and a golf game. Different games could be selected by flipping the switches on the front of the console in a certain order. The technology was soon licensed to Magnavox which soon came out with the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. -
Intel: First Microprocessor
Originally designed for use in a printing calculator, the CPU chip can be programmed in a wide variety of products. The size of a fingernail, it had the same computing power as the first electronic computer. It held 2,300 transistors and a circuit line of these were about as long as a human hair. This chip could perform about 90,000 operations a second in 4-bit chunks. -
MCA and Philips: The LaserDisc
LaserDisc is considered the first optical disc format and its technology was the inspiration for later forms of optical discs like CD and Blu-Ray (laser-etching onto a disc). The LaserDisc was typically 30cm and only allowed for 60 minutes of video per side and had to be flipped over like a record. Laserdisc was also modified to store data but was ultimately not successful due to its high pricetag. -
Larry Wall: Perl
Perl was originally designed as a programming language used to process reports and manipulate text files. It was also designed to be quick and easy to work with. Nowadays it is used in developing web applications, GUIs and overall helps multiple programs work together, which is why it has been called "the duct tape of the internet". Perl takes the best features of previous programming languages and doesn't require a compiler to run its code. -
John and Thomas Knoll: Photoshop
Thomas Knoll decided to code his own program after his Macintosh Plus couldn't display grayscale images on its display. His brother John, who worked special effects on the first Star Wars movie, encouraged him to add more editing features. To sell this software commercially, they named it Photoshop. The first retail version had an array of color correction tools, curves, levels and a clone tool. -
Sun Microsystems: Java 1.0
A successor to James Gosling's Oak programming language published in 1990. Java's motto was "Write Once, Run Anywhere" meaning a program written in Java can run on any system, giving people freedom from big-name software vendors like Microsoft. The developers originally thought of modifying C++ but later abandoned the idea and started from scratch. Java is a high-level programming language meant to be relatively easy to use and accessible to anybody. -
Japan: Earth Simulator
From 2002-2004, the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan held the world record for 35.86 trillion calculations per second. The mainframe was based off of vector computing to create global weather and climate models. In total, it contained 640 nodes with eight vector processors with 16 GB of memory at each node, 5120 total processors and 10 TB of memory. It was fairly accurate, able to render climate simulations of both the atmosphere and oceans down to 10 km.
