Before we start our journey on computer science itself, it is wise for us to know the origins of it, where did computer science come from? how did you get to where we are today? what are the precursors of computer science? So, as I know that most people never like to read about the beginnings or the history in computer science or scientific books, I will try to be quite brief and concise in this part, while still providing the essentials you need to know about it.
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I- The first computing tools
I will start this part by asking you a simple question: What was your first calculation tool? Most of us started doing small calculations in SIL, or kindergarten for the “super kids👍”, and our teacher would teach us to count with our fingers or sticks for those who remember. As we grew up and the operations we had to perform became difficult, new calculation tools appeared ranging from simple classroom calculators at the school level, to the more sophisticated at the university level. This evolution of our calculation methods is quite similar to the one of computer science which at the beginning was not the science of automatic information processing by the computer but something else. In the past, data processing (calculations in general) was done by hand or with stones “a bit like us at the beginning”, but with time these rudimentary methods proved to be ineffective in the face of increasingly large and complex problems, it is following this limit that researchers like Blaise Pascal invented the first calculating machine in 1642 and named Pascaline, which allowed to add and subtract two numbers as well as multiply and divide repeatedly.
This was the first tool to facilitate calculations. Next to this one, the slide rule was invented a little earlier in 1622 by William Oughtred, which allowed to perform basic and complex arithmetic operations.
Calculation ruler
Many mechanical calculation tools were invented before the first calculator appeared in the 1970s. However, many more needs appeared such as the automatic processing of a large amount of information which led to the appearance of computers.
II- The evolution of computers over time
After the advent of scientific and technical progress in the 19th century, characterized by the discovery and creation of fields such as photography, vaccines, the electric light bulb or the electric telegraph, there was a strong need to automate a certain number of things, to no longer have to use rudimentary methods to perform operations on data. One of the most advanced bodies in this thought at the time was the American army that invested a lot in the research of new solutions or new technologies and this led more than a century later in 1945, to the creation of the very first computer called the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). This was the culmination of many years of research by two scientists, Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who had succeeded in creating a gigantic computing device that was to be used by the American military to perform ballistic calculations. 5 years later, the Soviets, not wanting to be too far ahead in this field (because the current Russia (the former USSR) has always been one of the main competitors of the Americans in these fields), set up the MESM (Malaïa Elektronnaïa tchetnaïa Machina, “small electronic calculator”) which was composed of three times less component than the ENIAC and consumed less Energy. At the same time, the first computers for commercial use such as Manchester Mark I or the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) appeared, and all these computers were part of the first generation of computers characterized by the use of cathode ray tubes
From 1956, a new kind of computer appeared that used transistors instead of vacuum tubes, which allowed them to be faster, more precise and especially less bulky because the first versions of computers were almost the size of a house. One of the very first computers of this generation was the TRADIC created by the Bell Labs company in 1956 and which announced the hostilities of the second generation of computers. Then IBM launched the very first hard disk computer on the market. The IBM RAMAC 305 with a 5MB hard disk (hardly an audio file nowadays, but at the time a technological feat) was considered a major innovation, because for the first time a computer was open to the general public with built-in storage capacity. From this second generation there were other computers like the PDP-1 (Program data Processor) with a clock speed of 0.2 MHZ was the very first interactive computer. There was also the IBM 1401 which used punched cards, the IBM 7000 which was one of the very first computers based on transistors.
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