Pascaline, also

called
Arithmetic Machine,
the
first calculator or adding
machine to be produced in
any quantity and actually
used. The Pascaline was
designed and built by the
French
mathematicianphilosopher Blaise Pascal between 1642 and 1644. It could only do
addition and subtraction, with numbers being entered by manipulating its
dials. Pascal invented the machine for his father, a tax collector, so it was
the first business machine too (if one does not count the abacus). He built
50 of them over the next 10 years.
Reverend
William
Oughtred and others
developed the slide
rule
in
the
17th
century based on the
emerging
work
on
logarithms by John Napier. Before the advent of the
pocket calculator, it was the most commonly used
calculation tool in science and engineering. The use of
slide rules continued to grow through the 1950s and
1960s even as digital computing devices were being
gradually introduced; but around 1974 the electronic scientific
calculator made it largely obsolete[7][8][9][10] and most suppliers left the
business.

Arithmometer, early calculating

machine, built in 1820 by Charles
Xavier Thomas de Colmar
of France. Whereas earlier
calculating machines, such
as Blaise Pascals Pascaline
in France and Gottfried
Wilhelm von Leibnizs Step
Reckoner
in
Germany,
were mere curiosities, with the
Industrial Revolution came a widespread need to
perform repetitive operations efficiently. With other activities being
mechanized, why not calculation? De Colmar effectively met this
challenge when he built his Arithmometer, the first commercial massproduced calculating device. Based on Leibnizs technology, it could
perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and, with some more
elaborate user involvement, division. It was extremely popular and sold
for 90 years. In contrast to the modern calculators credit-card size, the
Arithmometer was large enough to cover a desktop.

The Analytical Engine was a proposed

mechanical general-purpose computer designed
by English mathematician Charles Babbage.

It

was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's

Difference engine, a design for a mechanical computer. The
Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic
unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching
and loops, and integrated memory,
making it the first design for a generalpurpose computer that could be described
in modern terms as Turing-complete.
Babbage was never able to complete
construction of any of his machines due to
conflicts with his chief engineer and
inadequate funding. It
was not until the 1940s
that the first generalpurpose computers were
actually built.

Augusta
Ada
Byron,
a
contemporary
of
the early nineteenth
century, was a woman ahead of her
time. She died when she was only 36
and for the next hundred years she
would be known as the daughter of Lord
Byron the poet. Only in this century
would she become known as the first "computer programmer."
Leibnitz
Calculating
Machine.
1671
Gottfried Wilhelm von
Leibnitz
(1646-1716)
invented a calculating
machine which was a
major
advance
in
mechanical calculating. The Leibniz calculator
incorporated a new mechanical feature, the stepped
drum a cylinder bearing nine teeth of different lengths which
increase in equal amounts around the drum. Although the Leibniz
calculator was not developed for commercial production, the stepped
drum principle survived for 300 years and was used in many later
calculating systems.

The Jacquard loom is a

mechanical loom, invented
by Joseph Marie Jacquard in
1801, that simplifies the
process of manufacturing
textiles
with
complex
patterns such as brocade,
damask, and matelasse.[ The
loom
is
controlled
by
punched cards with punched holes, each row of
which corresponds to one row of the design.
Multiple rows of holes are punched on each card and the many cards
that compose the design of the textile are strung together in order. It is
based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725),
Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques Vaucanson (1740).

The tabulating machine was an

electromechanical
machine
designed
to
assist
in
summarizing information and,
later, accounting. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the
machine was developed to help process data for the
1890 U.S. Census.