i tell the future … nothing easier. everybody's future is...

I tell the future … Nothing easier. Everybody's future is in their face. Nothing easier. But who can tell your past,—eh? Nobody! ...I can't tell the past and neither can you. If anyone tries to tell you the past, take my word for it, they're charlatans! … But I can tell the future. (II.179)

The Skin of Our Teeth Thornton Wilder, 1942

On 17th May 1902, the Antikythera mechanism was retrieved from the wreckage of a cargo ship in the Aegean sea.

The The instrument is believed to have been designed and constructed by Greek scientists and has been variously dated between 150 and 100 BC, or to 205 BC.

Hero of Alexandria, also known as Heron of Alexandria, c. 10 AD – c. 70 AD) a mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria, Roman Egypt. He is considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity.

...a device to dispense holy water, where a worshipper inserted a coin through a slot. This fell onto a tray connected to a lever, and the weight of the coin opened up a valve that let water flow out. Eventually, the coin slid off the tray and, with the aid of a counterweight, the lever snapped back into place

Arabic polymath Al-Jazari o “Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices,” published in 1206 o a water-powered automaton orchestra that could float on water and play music for parties o operated via a rotating drum with pegs that triggered levers to produce different sounds o the pegs on the rotating drum could be moved to create different songs o Al-Jazari’s robot band was one of the first programmable machines.

1588 The Various and Ingenious Machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli He designed a wheel of books! The seated reader uses hand or foot controls to move the desired book into their lap. Epicyclic gearing is used to ensure that the shelves remain at the same angle.

The "Draughtsman-Writer" automaton by Henri Maillardet ~1800

It used cams as read-only memory (ROM) to store pre-defined motion data to draw a picture on paper. It is likely the largest cam-based memory of any automaton of the era. The information capacity of the automaton to hold 7 drawings within the machine was calculated to be 299,040 points, almost 300 kilobits of storage.

http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HistoryPt2.htm


In 1801 Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a loom that could base its weave on a pattern that was automatically read from punched wooden cards held together by rope.


A programmable machine ! A program can be created on punched cards to direct the machine’s actions and produce a particular pattern woven into a fabric. Computer graphics ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PunchedCardsAnalyticalEngine.jpg

The Analytical Engine Charles Babbage, 1837, designed the first programmable mechanical computer.

The Tabulating Machine was an electromechanical machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on punched cards. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the machine was developed to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. Later models were widely used for business applications such as accounting and inventory control.

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954 was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.

In the 1930s, Paul Otlet started to imagine a global knowledge network that he dubbed the Mundaneum. In his 1935 book Monde, Otlet elaborated on his vision: “Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate the whole of creation, in whole or in certain parts.” ...they even ran a commercial service that would allow anyone to submit a query and receive an answer via telegraph, for a small fee.

...each machine would act as a kind of “dumb” terminal, fetching and displaying material stored in a central location...

A reproduction of Otlet’s original Mondotheque desk.

In 1927, Emanuel Goldberg patented a device called the Statistical Machine, which allowed a user to search and retrieve large volumes of data stored on microfilm by using a so-called search card. He later introduced a technique that would allow a user to enter a query via telephone: the first dial-up search engine.

Before leaving Paris, Goldberg attended a conference organized by Otlet on the future of documentation. There, the two men joined a number of other prominent librarians, scientists and publishers, all of whom were interested in exploring the potential of new technologies to tame the growing onslaught of recorded information. At the 1937 conference, Otlet and Goldberg had the chance to meet another important intellectual ally: the novelist H.G. Wells.

Vannevar Bush considered himself an inventor. While an undergraduate he designed a device that measured ground levels. You rolled it over the terrain and it drew a graph of the change in height. The device was purely mechanical but it included an integrator - the basic component needed to build an analog computer. It worked by summing up the changes in height to give the current height. The machine was so impressive that he was awarded both a patent in 1912 and a degree on the basis of it.

Vannevar Bush in the 1930s created an analog computer called the "Differential Analyzer" to solve differential equations. During WWII, he oversaw the creation of a variety of different calculating devices for use in the war effort: fire control tables for anti-aircraft guns, calculations for radar data. He was head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war – a government office that Bush eventually helped transform into the National Science Foundation (NSF). "basic research" was a concept no one used before Bush argued that it should be the Government's responsibility to fund it.

In 1936 Bush delivered a paper to the American Mathematical Society entitled 'Instrumental Analysis'. It discussed the work of Charles Babbage and his attempts to build an analytical engine. Bush thought that by linking together some IBM punch card machines under the control of a central programmer he could build a close approximation to Babbage's machine. It was clear that Bush had understood Babbage’s work and the idea of programmability.

Bush wanted to solve equations that related to power line transmission. This was a big problem back in the early days of electrification where exactly how electricity could be transmitted over long cables was a practical concern. These were differential equations that took months to solve. Bush decided that a quicker route to the solution was an analog computer. The MIT electrical engineering department spent the best part of 20 years on the project!

Bush first wrote most of “As We May Think” in 1939, but shelved his draft until after the war.) Both machines relied on microfilm for storing documents, and both provided a mechanism for collecting, annotating, and sharing documents. They also both featured rudimentary speech-recognition tools. But the two machines also differed from each other in several critical respects.

Otlet envisioned the Mundaneum as a tightly controlled environment, with a group of expert “bibliologists” working to catalog every piece of data by applying the exacting rules of the Universal Decimal Classification. Wells proposed something similar, with a special class of technical “samurai” administering the contents of the global brain. Bush, by contrast, envisioned a flat system with no classification scheme. Indeed, the Web’s openness and lack of hierarchy—for better and worse—has strong conceptual roots in Bush’s bottom-up document structure.

http://www.plyojump.com/classes/pre_1945.html

The first "computer bug" – On September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper, working on the Harvard University Mark II discovered that the problem with a program was actually a moth trapped in a relay... the program was "debugged.“

1962. ENIAC board, EDVAC board, ORDVAC board, and BRLESC-I board

BRLESC was designed primarily for scientific and military tasks requiring high precision and high computational speed, such as ballistics problems, army logistical problems, and weapons systems evaluations. It contained 1727 vacuum tubes and 853 transistors and had a memory of 4096 72-bit words. BRLESC employed punched cards, magnetic tape, and a magnetic drum as input-output devices, which could be operated simultaneously.

IBM System 360 Mainframe Computer (1960s)


teletype interface (text only)

Vectorscope graphics (1950s)

Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad, MIT,1963 interactive computer graphics

In 1965, Ted Nelson published the article “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminant” introducing the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia”

“Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’* to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.”

“Hyper-media are branching or performing presentations which respond to user actions, systems of prearranged words and pictures (for example) which may be explored freely or queried in stylized ways…. Like ordinary prose and pictures, they will be media; and because they are in some sense ‘multi-dimensional,’ we may call them hyper-media, following mathematical use of the term ‘hyper-.’ ”

“Personal Dynamic Media”

Alan Kay ~1968-1972

Xerox Star 8010 1981 - bitmapped display (frame buffer) - graphical user interface, - icons, folders, - Ethernet networking, - e-mail


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