What is the first computer?

From: Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk <(Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk)>
Date: Mon Jun 22 13:03:27 1998

>>Yes, but Pascal was born in 1623 so Schickard's device most likely beats
>>whatever Pascal developed in his lifetime (I think he was 18 when he
>>invented it).
>
> Late-comers, all of them. My vote for the earliest computer is the
> Antikythera Device, a bronze mechanical lunar month calculator built in
> Greece about 80AD.
>
> Shickard's "Calculating Clock" was the next mechanical calculator of record
> in 1623, followed by Blaise Pascal's "Pascaline" in 1642, Samuel Morland's
> mechanical calculator in 1666, Gottfried Leibnez' "Stepped Reckoner" in
> 1674, Phillip-Malthus Hahn's calculating machines (the first sold
> commercially) in 1774, and the third Earl of Stanhope's multiplying
> calculator in 1777. The first mass-produced calculating machine was Thomas
> de Colmar's "Arithmometer" in 1820.

Good point. Many early clocks were (or contained) primitive analogue
computers, so I think you win there... sort of.

Two books to look at: "The Mediaeval Machine" by J. Gimpel and "A
History of Engineering in Classical and Mediaeval Times" by D. R. Hill.

Gimpel will fill several holes in your timeline - Su Sung made quite a
complicated astronomical clock in c. 1090; the middle ages saw a
sizeable crop of similar machines in the west, culminating in that of
Giovanni Dondi, under development from 1348 until 1364.

Hill's treatment of clocks is also interesting. He points out that the
Classical civilisations had (presumably inherited from the ancients) a
system by which the hour changed in length depending on the date so that
sunrise to sunset was always twelve hours. Thus ordinary timekeeping
clocks had to combine time and date in an analogue computer to get
hour-number out at the end. Some of the mechanisms Hill describes get
this quite wrong! (I don't recall any of these clocks also taking
account of lattitude...)

OK. I'll go for the Z1 as the first _general purpose_ computer.

Philip.
Received on Mon Jun 22 1998 - 13:03:27 BST