HRM 3450 Lecture Notes - Lecture 29: Joseph Marie Jacquard, Blaise Pascal, Central Processing Unit
5 May 2018
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HRM 3450 Lecture 29 Notes – Early Work
Introduction
• In this context, one could consider the abacus, already in use as early as 500 BC by the
ancient Greeks and Romans, to be an early predecessor of the computer.
• Certainly, the abacus was capable of performing calculations and storing data.
• Actually, if one were to build a binary numbered abacus, its calculations would very
closely resemble those of the computer.
• The abacus remained in common use until the 1500s and, in fact, is still considered an
effective calculating tool in some cultures today.
• In the late 1500s, though, European inventors again began to put their minds to the
problem of automatic calculation.
• Blaise Pascal, a noted French mathematician of the 1600s, invented a calculating
machine in 1642 at the age of nineteen, although he was never able to construct the
machine.
• In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a loom that used punched cards to control the
patterns woven into cloth.
• The program provided by the punched cards controlled rods that raised and lowered
different threads in the correct sequence to print a particular pattern.
• This is the first documented application of the use of some form of storage to hold a
program for the use of a semi-automated, programmable machine.
• Charles Babbage, an English mathematician who lived in the early 1800s, spent much of
his own personal fortune attempting to build a mechanical calculating machine that he
alled a aalytial egie.
• The analytical engine resembles the modern computer in many conceptual ways.
• A photo of an early version of the analytical engine is shown
• Baages ahie eisioed the use of Jauads puhed ads fo iput data ad
for the program, provided memory for internal storage, performed calculations as
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