A Very Brief History of Computer Science
Written by
Jeffrey Shallit
for
CS 134
at the
University of Waterloo
in the summer of 1995.
This little web page was hastily stitched together in a few
days.
Perhaps eventually I will get around to doing a really
good job. Suggestions are always welcome.
A
translation of this web page into French has been prepared
by Anne Dicky at the University of Bordeaux.
A
translation of
this page into Belorussian is available, prepared by Alyona Lompar.
A
translation of
this page into Russian is available, prepared by Ted
Mosby.
Before 1900
People have been using mechanical devices to aid calculation for
thousands of years. For example, the abacus probably existed in
Babylonia (present-day Iraq) about 3000 B.C.E.
The ancient Greeks developed some very sophisticated analog computers.
In 1901, an ancient Greek shipwreck was discovered off the island
of Antikythera. Inside was a salt-encrusted device (now called the
Antikythera mechanism) that consisted of rusted
metal gears and pointers. When this
c. 80 B.C.E. device was
reconstructed, it produced a mechanism
for predicting the motions of the stars and planets.
(More Antikythera info
here.)
John Napier (1550-1617), the Scottish inventor of logarithms, invented
Napier's rods (sometimes called "Napier's bones") c. 1610
to simplify the task of multiplication.
In 1641 the French mathematician and philosopher
Blaise
Pascal (1623-1662)
built a mechanical adding machine. Similar work was done by
Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz also advocated use of the
binary system for doing calculations.
Recently it was discovered that
Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), a graduate
of the University of
Tübingen (Germany), constructed such a device in 1623-4,
before both Pascal and Leibniz. A brief description of the
device is contained in two letters to Johannes Kepler. Unfortunately,
at least one copy of the machine burned up in a fire, and Schickard
himself died of bubonic plague in 1635, during the Thirty Years' War.
Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) invented a loom that
could weave complicated patterns described by holes in punched cards.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871) worked on two mechanical devices:
the
Difference Engine
and the far more ambitious Analytical Engine (a precursor of the modern
digital computer), but neither worked satisfactorily. (Babbage was a bit
of an eccentric -- one biographer calls him an "irascible genius" --
and was probably the model for Daniel Doyce in
Charles Dickens' novel,
Little Dorrit. A little-known fact about
Babbage is that he invented the science of
dendrochronology -- tree-ring
dating -- but never pursued his invention. In his later years, Babbage
devoted much of his time to the
persecution of street musicians (organ-grinders).) The
Difference Engine can be viewed nowadays in the
Science Museum
in
London, England.
One of Babbage's friends,
Ada Augusta Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), sometimes is
called the "first programmer" because of a report she wrote on
Babbage's machine. (The programming language
Ada was named for her.)
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), a British economist and
logician, built a machine in 1869 to solve logic problems. It was "the first
such machine with sufficient power to solve a complicated problem
faster than the problem could be solved without the machine's
aid." (Gardner) It is now in the
Oxford Museum of the History of
Science.
Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) invented the modern punched card for use in
a machine he designed to help tabulate the 1890 census.
1900 - 1939: The Rise of Mathematics
Work on calculating machines continued. Some special-purpose
calculating machines were built. For example, in 1919,
E. O. Carissan (1880-1925),
a lieutenant in the French infantry, designed and had built a
marvelous
mechanical
device for factoring integers and testing them for primality.
The Spaniard Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1852-1936) built some electromechanical
calculating devices, including one that played simple chess endgames.
In 1928, the German mathematician
David Hilbert (1862-1943) addressed the International Congress
of Mathematicians. He posed three questions: (1) Is mathematics
complete; i.e. can every mathematical statement be either proved
or disproved? (2) Is mathematics consistent, that is, is it true
that statements such as "0 = 1" cannot be proved by valid methods?
(3) Is mathematics decidable, that is, is there a mechanical method
that can be applied to any mathematical assertion and (at least in
principle) will eventually tell whether that assertion is true or not?
This last question was called the
Entscheidungsproblem.
In 1931,
Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) answered two of Hilbert's questions. He showed that
every sufficiently powerful formal system is either inconsistent
or incomplete. Also, if an axiom system is consistent, this consistency
cannot be proved within itself. The third question remained open,
with 'provable' substituted for 'true'.
In 1936,
Alan Turing
(1912-1954)
provided a solution to Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem
by constructing a formal model of a computer -- the Turing machine --
and showing that
there were problems such a machine could not solve. One such problem
is the so-called "halting problem": given a Pascal program, does it
halt on all inputs?
1940's: Wartime brings the birth of the electronic digital computer
The calculations required for ballistics during World War II spurred the
development of the general-purpose electronic digital computer. At
Harvard,
Howard H. Aiken (1900-1973) built the
Mark I electromechanical
computer in 1944, with the assistance of
IBM.
Military code-breaking also led to computational projects. Alan Turing was
involved in the breaking of the code behind the German machine, the Enigma,
at Bletchley Park in England. The British built a computing device,
the Colossus, to assist with code-breaking.
At
Iowa State University
in 1939,
John Vincent Atanasoff (1904-1995) and Clifford Berry designed and
built an electronic computer for solving systems of linear equations,
but it never worked properly.
Atanasoff discussed his invention with
John William Mauchly (1907-1980), who later,
with
J. Presper Eckert, Jr.
(1919-1995),
designed and built the
ENIAC, a general-purpose
electronic computer originally intended for artillery calculations.
Exactly what ideas Mauchly got from Atanasoff is
not complely clear, and whether Atanasoff or Mauchly and Eckert deserve
credit as the originators of the electronic digital computer was the
subject of legal battles and ongoing historical debate. The ENIAC
was built at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania, and
was finished in 1946.
In 1944, Mauchly, Eckert, and
John von Neumann (1903-1957)
were already at work
designing a stored-program electronic computer, the
EDVAC. Von Neumann's
report, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC", was very influential and
contains many of the ideas still used in most modern digital computers, including
a mergesort routine. Eckert and Mauchly went on to build UNIVAC.
Meanwhile, in Germany,
Konrad Zuse (1910-1995)
built the first operational,
general-purpose, program-controlled calculator, the Z3, in 1941.
More information about Zuse can be found
here.
In 1945,
Vannevar Bush
published a
surprisingly prescient article in the
Atlantic Monthly
about the ways information processing would affect the society of the future.
(Another copy of the Bush article appears
here.)
Maurice Wilkes (b. 1913),
working in Cambridge, England, built the
EDSAC,
a computer based on the
EDVAC.
F. C. Williams (b. 1911) and others at
Manchester University
built the Manchester Mark I, one version of which was working as
early as June 1948. This machine is sometimes called the first stored-program
digital computer.
The
invention of the transistor in 1947 by
John Bardeen (1908-1991),
Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and
William Shockley (1910-1989) transformed the computer and
made possible the microprocessor revolution. For this discovery they
won the
1956 Nobel Prize in physics. (Shockley later became notorious
for his
racist views.)
Jay Forrester (b. 1918) invented magnetic core memory c. 1949.
More about Forrester
here.
1950's
Grace Murray Hopper
(1906-1992)
invented the notion of a compiler, at
Remington Rand, in 1951. Earlier, in 1947,
Hopper found the
first computer
"bug"
-- a real one -- a moth that had gotten into the Harvard Mark II. (Actually,
the use of ``bug'' to mean defect goes back to at least 1889.)
John Backus and
others developed the first FORTRAN compiler in April 1957.
LISP, a list-processing language for artificial intelligence programming,
was invented by
John McCarthy
about 1958.
Alan Perlis,
John Backus,
Peter Naur and others developed Algol.
In hardware, Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) and Robert Noyce (Fairchild
Semiconductor) invented the integrated circuit in 1959.
Edsger Dijkstra invented an efficient algorithm for shortest paths
in graphs as a demonstration of the ARMAC computer in 1956. He also
invented an efficient algorithm for the minimum spanning tree in order
to minimize the wiring needed for the X1 computer. (Dijkstra is famous
for his caustic, opinionated memos. For example, see his
opinions of some programming languages).
In a famous
paper
that appeared in the journal
Mind in 1950, Alan
Turing introduced the
Turing Test, one of the first efforts in the
field of artificial intelligence. He proposed a definition of
"thinking" or "consciousness" using a game: a tester would have to
decide, on the basis of written conversation, whether the entity
in the next room responding to the tester's queries was a human or
a computer. If this distinction could not be made, then it could be
fairly said that the computer was "thinking".
In 1952,
Alan Turing
was arrested for "gross indecency" after a
burglary led to the discovery of his affair with Arnold Murray. Overt
homosexuality was taboo in 1950's England, and Turing was forced
to take estrogen "treatments" which rendered him impotent and caused
him to grow breasts. On June 7, 1954, despondent over his situation, Turing
committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
1960's
In the 1960's, computer science came into its own as a
discipline.
In fact, the term was coined by
George Forsythe,
a numerical analyst.
The first computer science department was formed at
Purdue University in 1962.
The first person to receive a Ph. D. from
a computer science department was Richard Wexelblat,
at the University of Pennsylvania, in December
1965.
Operating systems saw major advances.
Fred Brooks at IBM
designed System/360, a line of different computers with the same
architecture and instruction set, from small machine to top-of-the-line.
Edsger
Dijkstra at Eindhoven designed the THE multiprogramming system.
At the end of the decade, ARPAnet, a precursor to today's
Internet, began to be constructed.
Many new programming languages were invented, such as BASIC
(developed c. 1964 by
John Kemeny (1926-1992) and Thomas Kurtz (b. 1928)).
The 1960's also saw the rise of automata theory and the theory of
formal languages. Big names here include
Noam Chomsky and
Michael Rabin. Chomsky later became well-known for his theory
that language is "hard-wired" in human brains, and for his criticism
of American foreign policy.
Proving correctness of programs using formal methods also began
to be more important in this decade. The work of
Tony Hoare played an important role.
Hoare also invented
Quicksort.
Douglas C. Engelbart invents the computer mouse c. 1968, at SRI.
Ted Hoff (b. 1937) and Federico Faggin at Intel designed the first
microprocessor (computer on a chip) in 1969-1971.
A rigorous mathematical basis for the analysis
of algorithms began with the work of
Donald Knuth (b. 1938), author of 3-volume treatise entitled
The Art of Computer Programming.
1970's
The theory of databases saw major advances with the work
of
Edgar F. Codd on relational databases. Codd won the Turing award
in 1981.
Unix, a very influential operating system,
was developed at Bell Laboratories by
Ken Thompson (b. 1943) and
Dennis Ritchie (b. 1941).
Brian Kernighan and Ritchie together developed C, an influential
programming language.
Other new programming languages, such as Pascal (invented by
Niklaus Wirth) and Ada (developed by a team led by Jean
Ichbiah), arose.
The first RISC architecture was begun by
John Cocke in
1975, at the Thomas J. Watson Laboratories of IBM. Similar projects
started at Berkeley and Stanford around this time.
The 1970's also saw the rise of the supercomputer. Seymour
Cray (b. 1925) designed the
CRAY-1, which was first shipped in
March 1976. It could perform 160 million operations in a second.
The Cray XMP came out in 1982.
Cray Research was taken over by Silicon Graphics.
There were also major advances in algorithms and computational
complexity. In 1971,
Steve Cook published his seminal paper on NP-completeness,
and shortly thereafter,
Richard Karp showed that many natural combinatorial problems were
NP-complete. Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman published a paper that
introduced the theory of public-key cryptography, and
a public-key cryptosystem known as
RSA was invented by
Ronald Rivest,
Adi Shamir, and
Leonard Adleman.
In 1979, three graduate students in North Carolina developed a
distributed news server which eventually became
Usenet.
1980's
This decade also saw the rise of the personal computer, thanks
to
Steve Wozniak
and Steve Jobs, founders of Apple Computer.
The first
computer viruses are developed c. 1981. The term was
coined by
Leonard Adleman, now at the
University of Southern
California.
In 1981, the first truly successful portable computer was
marketed, the
Osborne I. In 1984, Apple first marketed the Macintosh
computer.
In 1987, the US National Science Foundation started NSFnet, precursor
to part of today's
Internet.
1990's and Beyond
Parallel computers continue to be developed.
Biological computing, with the recent work of Len Adleman on doing
computations via DNA, has great promise. The
Human Genome Project
is attempting to sequence all the DNA in a single human being.
Quantum computing gets a boost with the discovery by Peter Shor
that integer factorization can be performed efficiently on a (theoretical)
quantum computer.
The "Information Superhighway" links more and more computers
worldwide.
Computers get smaller and smaller; the birth of nano-technology.
Other Web Resources for History of Computer Science
shallit@graceland.uwaterloo.ca
On Wednesday, Facebook
COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will appear before
Congress in the latest high profile hearings for tech on Capitol Hill.
The main event will take place at 9:30 a.m. ET, as the pair of tech
execs faces the defense and cybersecurity-minded Senate Select
Intelligence Committee.
