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The steam-powered automatic flute described by the Book of Ingenious Devices (850) by the Persian-Baghdadi Banū Mūsā brothers may have been the first programmable device. [10] Other early mechanical devices used to perform one or another type of calculations include the planisphere and other mechanical computing devices invented by Al-Biruni ...
The first one was an automatic mechanical calculator, his difference engine, which could automatically compute and print mathematical tables. In 1855, Georg Scheutz became the first of a handful of designers to succeed at building a smaller and simpler model of his difference engine. [10]
Arab astronomer, Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī (Arzachel) of al-Andalus, invented the Equatorium [citation needed], a mechanical analog computer device used for finding the longitudes and positions of the Moon, Sun and planets without calculation, using a geometrical model to represent the celestial body's mean and anomalistic position.
Foreground: 'operational cards', for inputting instructions; background: 'variable cards', for inputting data. Babbage's first attempt at a mechanical computing device, the Difference Engine, was a special-purpose machine designed to tabulate logarithms and trigonometric functions by evaluating finite differences to create approximating ...
The Curta was conceived by Curt Herzstark in the 1930s in Vienna, Austria.By 1938, he had filed a key patent, covering his complemented stepped drum. [3] [4] This single drum replaced the multiple drums, typically around 10 or so, of contemporary calculators, and it enabled not only addition, but subtraction through nines complement math, essentially subtracting by adding.
To perform the calculation 25 + 9, one presses keys in the following sequence on most calculators: 2 5 + 9 =. When 2 5 is entered, it is picked up by the scanning unit; the number 25 is encoded and sent to the X register; Next, when the + key is pressed, the "addition" instruction is also encoded and sent to the flag or the status register;
Babbage's devices could be reprogrammed 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 ...
At the time Martin wrote the book, "mechanical calculating machines were a symbol of high-tech sophistication in the workplace"; reviewer Jonathan Samuel Golan suggests that it was aimed at collectors rather than historians, [5] while the editors of the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society suggest that instead its purpose was to inform the public. [4]