Small introduction

Premises of data processing

- 3000 : Period of the Fou-Hi Chinese emperor of which the magic symbol, the octagone atrigramme contains the first 8 numbers represented in binary format by features stopped or not: 000 001 010 011 etc...

-500 : Appearance with the Average East of the first " tool " of calculation: the abacus and the counting frame

-300 : The Greek philosopher Aristote defines in its work what is logic.

1580 : John NAPIER invent the logarithms.

1623 : Wilhelm Schickard invent what it calls a calculating clock. It calculated mechanically thanks to toothed wheels and could carry out additions, subtractions, multiplications and memorizing of the intermediate results. The machine quickly sank; in the lapse of memory because its inventor lived in Germany of the South in an area devastated by the 30 year old war.

1623 : The philosopher Francis Bacon invent the Code Bilitère two letters which allows by using 5 characters to code the letters of the Alphabet.

1642 : Pascal develops, to help his/her collecting father of the taxes in Rouen, the Pascaline who could treat the additions and the subtractions. Contrary to the machine of Schickard, it have a certain success of regard at the court of the King It is for that that it is often regarded as the first desk-top calculator history.

1679 : Leibnitz discover and develops arithmetic binary (and analyzes the octogrammes the Fou-Hi). It also invents in 1694 a desk-top calculator derived from Pascaline but able to treat the multiplications and divided.

1728 : Falcon built the first weaving loom using the punch cards to function.

1770 : Hahn in Germany invents the first desk-top calculator directly carrying out the 4 operations (founded on the cylinder toothed inventépar Leibnitz in 1671).

1820 : Charles-Xavier Thomas de Colmar invent the calculating machine on the basis of machine of Leibnitz. As it is a machine practical, easy to use and portable, the machine gained a great success. More than 1500 specimens will be sold by it in 30 years. The machine obtained the gold medal of the Exposure of Paris in 1855.

1833 : Babbage imagine and tries to produce a machine with differences then an analytical machine which contains the concepts of what will be the modern computer: calculating unit, memory, register and input of the data by punch card. Babbage, well too perfectionist, will be able to never conclude these achievements.

1840 : Collaborator of Babbage, Ada Lovelace, mathematician, defines the principle of the successive iterations in the execution of an operation. In honour of the Arab mathematician Al Khowarizmi (820), it names the logical process of execution of a program: algorithme.

1854 : Boole publish a work in which it shows that any logical process can be broken up into a succession of logical operations (AND, OR, NOT) applied to two states (ZERO-ONE,YES-NOT,TRUTH-FORGERY,OPENED-CLOSED).

1858 : The first transatlantic cable is drawn between the States Unis and Europe to inter-connect the systèmes communication Americans and Europeans. It ceased functioning at the end of a few days! A second transatlantic cable was drawn in 1866 and remained in exploitation during a hundred years.

1867 : The Americans Sholes and Glidden invent and market the first typewriter under the mark Remington.

1867 : The American Graham Bell invent the phone and melts the company Bell Telephone Company.

1884 : Herman Hollerith create a tabulator with punch cards (inspired by the weaving looms Jacquard to carry out the American census of 1890. It is a question of the first machine to treat the information. The visible drawing on the right represents all the stages of the data processing at the time of the census (drawing published in No 9 of the review Scientific American on August 30, 1890).

1886 : Don E Felt from Chicago launches the Comptometer. It is about the first computer of which one was useful oneself while pressing on keys. It invented in 1889 the first computer of office with printer.

1889 : The French Léon Bollée (also known for its victories in motor race) creates a machine with called direct multiplication the millionnaire.Cette machine will be a great success and will be produced until 1935.

1892 : William S. Burroughs invent a machine resembling the Comptometer of more reliable Felt but. It is with this machine that will develop a real market for these desk calculators.

1896 : Herman Hollerith, extremely success of its machines at the time of the American census, creates the firm Tabulating Machine Corporation specialized in the data processing machines. One also spoke about data processing.

1904 : Invention of the first vacuum tube, the diode by John Fleming.

1907 : Invention of the triode by Lee De Forest.

1919 : Invention of the rocking-lever of Eccles and Jordan starting from two triodes. More known maintaining under the name of flip-flop or bistable circuit.

1924 : The firm creates by Herman Hollerith in 1896, Tabulating Corporation Machine;, is re-elected in International Business Machine or IBM

1930 : Creation of the differential analyser by Vanevar Bush with the MIT to solve certain equations used in the electric circuits. It is about an electromechanical analogue computer. 7 or 8 specimens will be built.

1935 : IBM market the IBM 601, a using relay computer of the punch cards able to carry out a multiplication in one second. It will be sold by it 1500 specimens primarily for the scientific and countable markets.

1937 : George Stibitz create the first binary circuit, an adder. It calls it the Model K (for Kitchen) because it it A creates in its kitchen starting from a board with bread!

1937 : Alan Mr. Turing publish a document on the calculable numbers. It solved mathematical problems by using a kind of logical computer very simple called since Machine of Turing: **time-out** a tape of paper comprise of box, of pawn to put on these box, a trombone point on the box current and a table of instruction conditional to carry out.

1938 : Thesis of Shannon who the first does it parallel between the electric circuits and the Booléenne algebra. It defines the binary digit bit (BInary digiT).

1938 : Creation of the Versuchmodell 1 or Z1 by Konrad Zuse. It develops it in the show of his parents in Berlin! It is about a programmable but mechanical binary computer. It never functioned really correctly.

1939 : John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry produce a binary adder 16 bits. It was the first computer to use vacuum tubes.

1940 : George Stibitz and Samuel Williams, both working for Bell develop the Complex Number Computer also called Model I, a computer working in DCB (decimal coded; binary). It consisted of 450 relays and Teletype to enter the data and to read the results. It could multiply two large digits in one minute. The computer was very simple of use and could be used by several distant people (but not at the same time).

1940 : To decipher to the German messages the English create on the site of Bletchley Park the computers Robinson and Colossus who the first integrate the concepts of arithmetic binary, internal clock, report buffer, tape readers, Boolean operators, of under programs and printers. All this will remain unknown Secret bus " defense " until 1975.

1940 : Bell install Teletype terminals in Darmouth College (New Hampshire), connected by telegraph lines on the Model I in Manhattan at the time of a congress of American Mathematical Society. Two researchers Norbert Wiener and John Mauchly make the demonstration of the possibilities of remote calculation.

1941 : Creation of the binary computer ABC by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. The machine uses lamps and comprises a memory and logical circuits. It was the first computer to use the Boolean algebra. The memory, made up of 2 drums, could store 60 words of 50 bits. The machine turned to 60 Hz and could carry out an addition in one second.

1941 : Konrad Zuse, mobilized in the aircraft factories Henschel, develops with a team of 15 people the Z3, the first computer with recorded program. Because of this characteristic, one can consider that it is about the true premier ordinateur. It was of a machine made up of 2600 relays, of a console for the operator and a tape reader containing the instructions to be carried out. The machine could store 64 numbers of 22 bits. It could carry out 4 additions a second and a multiplication in 4 seconds. It was destroyed in a bombardment combined in 1945.

April; A more powerful computer, the Z4 was also réalisé.Zuse, its team and the Z4 dismounted, fled of Berlin in front of the Russian projection and were found by the allied troops. The computer was examined by the Office of US Naval Search. Il fût ensuite installé à l'école Polytechnique de Zurich en 1950 puis installé en France à Bâle dans un institut de recherches aérodynamiques ou il servit jusqu'en 1960.

1943 : Creation of the ASCC I Mark; (Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator Mark I) in Harvard by Howard Aiken and its team (with the support of IBM). It is an enormous electromechanical computer (3000 relays, 800 km of cables) which makes it possible to make 3 operations out of 23 digits a second. This machine was very close in its principle to operation of the plans of the analytical machine of Babbage dating from the 19th century. The program was read since a paper tape. The data to be treated could be read since another tape of paper or a card reader. The conditional branches were not possibles.
Thereafter, the machine was modified to allow, thanks to other going, tape readers to read a sequence of instructions on another reader, thus allowing the conditional branches or the launching of under programs.

1945 : John Von Neuman, having joined the team working on the ENIAC, publish the first report describing what should be a computer with recorded program that it calls the EDVAC (Variable Electronic Discrete Automatic Computer). It is with this very complete document that one refers while speaking about computer to architecture Von Neuman.