The Story of Communication:
Computer—Fascinating Facts
- North American Indians scratched messages on pieces of wood,
a code known to sender and receiver: "We won a battle." "We caught no game."
- The first computer was the caveman's fingers, which could add
two animals plus three animals.
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- "Calculus" is the Latin word for "pebble."
- The abacus, invented about 5,000 years ago in the Near East,
made it easy for a Roman merchant to divide CXXVI by VI.
- Two famous philosophers, Pascal and Leibniz, built calculating
machines.
- News of ships foundering on rocks led Charles Babbage, the “father”
of the computer, to seek a better way to calculate navigation
tables.
- One of the few people who understood Charles Babbage’s ideas
for a computer was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. She wrote
about them.
- The idea of data processing grew out of a system of weaving patterns
in cloth with colored thread.
- The Census Bureau clerk who won a contest for a new method to
count the population went into a business that became IBM
- A key discovery that led to the modern computer was made on a
kitchen table out of odds and ends.
- At the dawn computing, the “Turing test” was to design a computer
so that a questioner would not know if a machine or a person
replied.
- British calculators secretly cracked the "unbreakable" German
military code. Sixty years later Britain still kept some of the
secrets.
- Early computers had acronymic names like ENIAC, EDVAC, EDSAC,
ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, MADM, SWAC, BINAC and MANIAC.
- John von Neumann, a mathematical genius, was brought to the new
world of computers by someone who recognized him at a train station.
- When CBS revised a surprising computer forecast in reporting
the 1952 election, the New York Times reported CBS was unfair
to the computer. The forecast proved accurate.
- AT first, IBM President Thomas Watson saw no commercial value
in computers.
- Some movie goers learned about computers for the first time in
1957. A computer figured in the Spencer Tracy - Katherine Hepburn
film, Desk Set.
- In the 1960s, few researchers had computers. They shared their
use in systems called time-sharing and batch processing.
- The first mini computers came out of an old Massachusetts woolen
mill that made blankets for both sides during the Civil War.
- Before they founded Apple Computer, teenagers Steven Jobs and
Stephen Wozniak built some illegal "blue boxes" for free long distance calls.
- Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak raised some of the money to start
producing Apple computers by selling their calculator and VW
bus.
- The computer became Time’s "Man of the Year" for 1982.
- The first programmers were scientists who had the mind-bending
work of writing in machine language, a seemingly endless series
of O’s and 1’s.
- Bill Gates and Paul Allen were hired to write the program for
the entire Bonneville Power Administration electricity grid.
No one knew that Gates was only 15.
- If you think automatic language translation will be easy to
create, think of the various meanings of the phrase, "Time flies like an arrow."
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