ICT 202 Lecture 10: Week 4: Computing
5 Feb 2019
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Document Summary
U. s. needed help with the 1890 census. Dr. herman hollerith, statistician and inventor was hired to help. Took punch cards from the jacquard loom and turned it into a punch card database. Used circuit completion with electro-mechanical parts for tabulation. Cut down the census tabulation by 6 years, which saved millions. Production of punch-card machines and mechanical calculators. But, still some problems with electro-mechanical devices. We"re using electricity now to help us, but mechanical parts fail. A vacuum tube is an electronic valve that controls the flow of electricity, allowing a small signal to control a larger one. Tubes can also be used was switches- representing a zero or a one- which is how they were used in early electronic computers. Vacuum tubes use a heated filament, called a cathode, to boil off electrons into a vacuum. No moving parts, but they are large, fragile, and burn out like light bulbs. Artillery and bombing tables took too long.
