The Historical Mechanical calculating and counting devices of computers

There were mechanical calculating and counting devices used during the discovery of computer, some of them include;

1. Abacus: This was also called accounting frame, it is a calculating tool used primarily in parts of Asia for performing arithmetic processes. Today, Abaci I often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires. Originally they were beads or stones moved in grooves and sand or on tablets of wood, stone or metal. The abacus was in use centuries before they adoption of the written modern numeral system and it is still widely used by merchants, traders and clerks in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. The user of an abacus is called an abasist. The use of the word abacus dates before 1387 AD, when a meadow English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sand board abacus. Different nations developed their peculiar abaci namely; Mesopotamia, China, Russia, Roman, Japanese, Korean. Around the world, abaci have been in preschools and elementary schools as an aid in teaching the numeral system. An adapted abacus invented by Tim Cranmer, called a Cranmer abacus is still commonly used by individuals who are blind. A piece of soft fabric or rubber is placed behind the beads so that they do not move unnecessary. This keeps the beats in place while the users feel or manipulate them. They use an abacus to perform the mathematical functions, multiplications, divisions, addition, subtraction, square roots and cubic root. Although blind students have benefited from talking calculators, The abacus is still very often taught to these students in early grades both in public schools and state schools for the blind. Many blind people find this number machine a very useful tool to throughout life. The binary abacus is used to explain how computers manipulate numbers. The abacus shows how numbers, letters and signs can be stored in a binary system on a computer.
2. Slide Rule: in 1922 William Oughtred invented the slide rule. William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule in the 17th century based on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier. The slide rule is a mechanical analogue computer. It is known ordinarily as a slipstick. The slide room is used primarily for multiplication and division and also for functions such as roots, logarithms and trigonometry but it’s not normally used for addition or subtraction. Slide rules come in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear or circular form. They have a standardised set of markings essential to perform mathematical computations. There are slide rules manufactured for specialised fields such as aviation or finance. Such slide rules have additional skills that aid in calculations common to those fields. Traditionally slide rules we are made out of hardwood such as mahogany or boxwood with cursors of glass and metal. In 1895 a Japanese firm, Hemmi started to make slide rules from bamboo which had the advantages of being dimensionally stable, strong and naturally self lubricating. Later slide rules were made of plastic or aluminium painted with plastic. The importance of the slide rule began to diminish as electronic computers became widely available to technical workers during the 1960s. The introduction of Fortran in 1957 made computers more acceptable for solving modest size mathematical problems.

Electro-mechanical counting devices: The following electro-mechanical counting devices have been developed.

1. John Napier Bone
2. Blaise Pascal Machine
3. Gottfried Von Leibniz machine
4. Joseph Jacquard Loom
5. Charles Babbage Analytical Engine
6. Philip Emeagwali supercomputer

John Napier Bone: Napier’s bone is a device consisting of square roots position side by side marked with digits used for multiplication and division. John Napier was a Scottish mathematician and physicist. He noted that multiplication and division of numbers could be performed by addition and subtraction respectively using logarithms of those numbers. While producing the first logarithmic tables Napier needed to perform many multiplications and it was at this point that he designed Napier’s bones. The world’s practical calculator, one that could multiply divide and find roots was developed in England during the latter part of the 16th century

Napier is unquestionably one of the greatest of the early mathematicians. He developed what eventually became there foundational infrastructure of modern mathematics. He believed that arithmetic was the essential stepping stone to all greater mathematical understanding of the universe. He was devoted to and was probably the first to develop arithmetic calculation procedures that did not require an understanding of the mathematics behind the procedure. This meant reducing multiplication, division and root calculations into simple addition and subtraction.

Napier’s greatest accomplishment, Henry Briggs a friend of Napier then developed them into the form that we still use today. Logarithms we are in common use for more than two centuries after Napier’s death and we are taught as a subject in them the USA until the late 1960s when scientific calculator took over.

Blaise Pascal Machine: Blaise Pascal’s machine was the first digital calculator. He built it as a means of helping his father perform tedious tax accounting in 1964 at the age of 18. The device was called Pascal’s calculator all the pascaline or the arithmetque.

he was France’s most celebrated mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher. He was by his father, he laid the foundation for the theory of probability. Pascal continued to make improvements to his design through the next decade and built a total of 50 pascaline machines. The first pascaline could only handle five digit numbers but later Pascal developed six digital and eight digital versions of the pascaline.

Gottfried Leibniz Machine: in 1671 the German mathematician philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz designed a calculating machine called the step reckoner, it was first built in 1673. The step reckoner improved on Pascal’s ideas and did multiplication by repeated addition and shifting. His machine was the first calculator that could perform all four arithmetic operations automatically while adding direct multiplication and division to the pascaline. Leibniz was a strong advocate of the binary system. Leibniz had the foresight That’s the binary system could be used in calculating machines in the future, though his machine did not use it. Instead the step reckoner represented numbers in decimal form as positions on 10 position dials.

Joseph Jacquard Loom: The Jacquard Loom is a mechanical loom, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801. It simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns such as brocade, The mask and matelasse. The loom is controlled by punched cards with punched holes, each row of which corresponds to one row of the design. The Jacquard Loom was the first machine to use to control a sequence of operations. Although it did no computation based on them, it is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware. The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards helped in the development of computer programming.