History

3 Pages 706 Words

The start of the modern science that we call "Computer Science" can be traced back to a long ago age where man still dwelled in caves or in the forest, and lived in groups for protection and survival from the harsher elements on the Earth. Many of these groups possessed some primitive form of animistic religion; they worshipped the sun, the moon, the trees, or sacred animals. Within the tribal group was one individual to whom fell the responsibility for the tribe's spiritual welfare. It was he or she who decided when to hold both the secret and public religious ceremonies, and interceded with the spirits on behalf of the tribe. In order to correctly hold the ceremonies to ensure good harvest in the fall and fertility in the spring, the shamans needed to be able to count the days or to track the seasons. From the shamanistic tradition, man developed the first primitive counting mechanisms -- counting notches on sticks or marks on walls.

For over a thousand years after the Chinese invented the abacus, not much progress was made to automate counting and mathematics. The Greeks came up with numerous mathematical formulae and theorems, but all of the newly discovered math had to be worked out by hand. A mathematician was often a person who sat in the back room of an establishment with several others and they worked on the same problem. The redundant personnel working on the same problem were there to ensure the correctness of the answer. It could take weeks or months of labourious work by hand to verify the correctness of a proposed theorem. Most of the tables of integrals, logarithms, and trigonometric values were worked out this way, their accuracy unchecked until machines could generate the tables in far less time and with more accuracy than a team of humans could ever hope to achieve.

By the late 1930s punched-card machine techniques had become so well established and reliable that Howard Aiken, in collaboration with engineers at ...