| 3000 yrs ago |
The Chinese first used the Abacus for arithmetic. It's still used
in many countries. |
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1614 |
Scottish mathematician John Napier published his invention of the concept of the logarithm, having worked on it for 20 years. |
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1617 |
John Briggs, a professor of geometry at Oxford in England, published
the first table of logarithms (to base 10) of numbers 1 to 1000. |
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1622 | William Oughtred, an English mathematician, invented a slide rule
(an analog device). |
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1642 | Blaise Pascal, an extremely intelligent 19 year old French
Mathematician, built the first mechanical computer, or adding
machine. It could add and subtract numbers. The adding mechanism
in this machine is still used in many present-day machines. |
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1801 | Joseph Jacquard - he used punched cards to automate control of looms
for weaving. |
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1820/30 | Charles Babbage, a British mathematician, designed the forerunners
of the modern computer, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine.
The Analytical Engine was never built because engineers had not yet learned how to
build precision instruments of this type (and political problems). |
|
mid 1800's | Slide rule as we know it today invented by French artillery officer,
Amedee Mannheim. Based on logarithms, it allowed a gunner to compute
ballistic information more quickly. |
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1890 | Herman Hollerith introduced punched cards to help him count people in the 1890 census. |