Here is the start to what I hope you will find as an interesting history of technology.
We will discuss the history of technology and computers, how computer technology is shaping our lives today and finally, future trends in technology.
First of all, before electricity, there were some mechanical devices that did calculations.
Here is a link to Babbages’s analytical engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine#/media/File:AnalyticalMachine_Babbage_London.jpg
If you look at the next image, you will see “punch cards”. What were punch cards used for?
Here are Babbage’s plans for his mechanical computer:
You can see that there were gears that were interlocked. For example, if one gear turned 10 times, that would cause another gear to turn once. In that we way, two full turns of the big gear and 4 turns of the small gear would represent the number 24. ( 2 * 10 + 4)
How many turns in the big gear and how many turns in the small gear would be necessary to represent the number 45?
The second device that we will look at is called the abacus. Here is an image of the abacus:
http://web.csulb.edu/~cwallis/labs/computability/abacus.html
The beads above were valued as a 5. The beads below were valued as 1. So two top beads and 4 bottom beads equaled 2 * 5 + 4 = 14.
If you look further down the web page, you will see that they could have one lower bead represent 10 units and the upper bead can represent 1 unit. YOU COULD ALSO EVEN HAVE A DECIMAL POINT!!
Name the parts of the abacus that you find labeled on the web page.
There was a German mathematician named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and he developed a computing device. Here is a link to the device:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepped_reckoner
In what year did he build his device?
If you look down the diagram in the middle of the page, you can see that he made a device that turns only when it meshes with the teeth in a large rotating drum.
With how many teeth did the device mesh with in the diagram given in the middle of the page?
Therefore, we can basically see that before electronic computers, there were mechanical computers that used rotating gears and physical components to represent and store numbers. Three devices were the abacus, Babbage’s analytical machine and Leibniz “stepped reckoner”.
