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Napier's bones is a manually operated calculating device created by John Napier of Merchiston, Scotland for the calculation of products and quotients of numbers. The method was based on lattice multiplication, and also called rabdology, a word invented by Napier.
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 ...
Modern English translations of both Napier's books on logarithms and their description can be found on the web, as well as a discussion of Napier's bones and Promptuary (another early calculating device). [11] His invention of logarithms was quickly taken up at Gresham College, and prominent English mathematician Henry Briggs visited Napier in ...
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 ...
The 19th century also saw the designs of Charles Babbage calculating machines, first with his difference engine, started in 1822, which was the first automatic calculator since it continuously used the results of the previous operation for the next one, and second with his analytical engine, which was the first programmable calculator, using ...
This data processing was accomplished by processing punched cards through various unit record machines in a carefully choreographed progression. [5] This progression, or flow, from machine to machine was often planned and documented with detailed flowcharts that used standardized symbols for documents and the various machine functions. [ 6 ]
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The analytical engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. [2] [3] It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's Difference Engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical calculator.