charles babbage used punch cards to create a new calculating system.
charles babbage used punch cards to create a new calculating system.
who used punch cards to create a new calculating system?
charles babbage
indeed, when john napier discovered logarithms for computational purposes in the early 17th century, there followed a period of considerable progress by inventors and scientists in making calculating tools. the apex of this early era of formal computing can be seen in the difference engine and its successor the analytical engine (which was never completely constructed but was designed in detail), both by charles babbage. the analytical engine combined concepts from his work and that of others to create a device that if constructed as designed would have possessed many properties of a modern electronic computer. these properties include such features as an internal "scratch memory" equivalent to ram, multiple forms of output including a bell, a graph-plotter, and simple printer, and a programmable input-output "hard" memory of punch cards which it could modify as well as read. the key advancement which babbage's devices possessed beyond those created before his was that each component of the device was independent of the rest of the machine, much like the components of a modern electronic computer. this was a fundamental shift in thought; previous computational devices served only a single purpose, but had to be at best disassembled and reconfigured to solve a new problem. babbage's devices could be reprogramed to solve new problems by the entry of new data, and act upon previous calculations within the same series of instructions. ada lovelace took this concept one step further, by creating a program for the analytical engine to calculate bernoulli numbers, a complex calculation requiring a recursive algorithm. this is considered to be the first example of a true computer program, a series of instructions that act upon data not known in full until the program is run.
history of computing
in ellis' free time on the job, he read and re-read the dozens of computer manuals that came with the machine. he taught himself as much as possible about the machine without touching it. two months after he started the job, ellis helped the company through an emergency. they had run out of unused punch cards, and needed to use the computer to process payroll by morning. during the emergency, ellis was the only one who knew how to recycle the used punch cards. he lifted the hood of the computer and disabled the parity check circuitry. the used punch cards were recycled and the company was able to process the payroll. after this experience, the company began to seek him out whenever they had computer problems, and even asked him to operate and program the computer for them. ellis states that this experience helped ignite his passion for computing
clarence ellis (computer scientist)