ancient romans devised the calculator known as the step reckoner.
ancient romans devised the calculator known as the step reckoner.
who devised the calculator known as the step reckoner?
ancient romans
stepped reckoner









































the step reckoner (or stepped reckoner) was a digital mechanical calculator invented by the german mathematician gottfried wilhelm leibniz around 1672 and completed in 1694. the name comes from the translation of the german term for its operating mechanism, "staffelwalze", meaning 'stepped drum'. it was the first calculator that could perform all four arithmetic operations. 









































its intricate precision gearwork, however, was somewhat beyond the fabrication technology of the time; mechanical problems, in addition to a design flaw in the carry mechanism, prevented the machines from working reliably.
stepped reckoner
wilhelm schickard designed and constructed the first working mechanical calculator in 1623. in 1673, gottfried leibniz demonstrated a digital mechanical calculator, called the stepped reckoner. he may be considered the first computer scientist and information theorist, for, among other reasons, documenting the binary number system. in 1820, thomas de colmar launched the mechanical calculator industry when he released his simplified arithmometer, which was the first calculating machine strong enough and reliable enough to be used daily in an office environment. charles babbage started the design of the first "automatic mechanical calculator", his difference engine, in 1822, which eventually gave him the idea of the first "programmable mechanical calculator", his analytical engine. he started developing this machine in 1834, and "in less than two years, he had sketched out many of the salient features of the modern computer". "a crucial step was the adoption of a punched card system derived from the jacquard loom" making it infinitely programmable. in 1843, during the translation of a french article on the analytical engine, ada lovelace wrote, in one of the many notes she included, an algorithm to compute the bernoulli numbers, which is considered to be the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer. around 1885, herman hollerith invented the tabulator, which used punched cards to process statistical information; eventually his company became part of ibm. in 1937, one hundred years after babbage's impossible dream, howard aiken convinced ibm, which was making all kinds of punched card equipment and was also in the calculator business to develop his giant programmable calculator, the ascc/harvard mark i, based on babbage's analytical engine, which itself used cards and a central computing unit. when the machine was finished, some hailed it as "babbage's dream come true".
computer science