The 17th Century: The Invention of the First "Computers" The devices often considered the first "computers" in our understanding were rather calculators than the sophisticated combination of hard- and software we call computers today. In 1642 Blaise Pascal, the son of a French tax collector, developed a device to perform additions. His numerical wheel calculator was a brass rectangular box and used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Designed to help his father with his duties, the big disadvantage of the Pascaline was its limitation to addition. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher, in 1694 improved the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply. As its predecessor Leibniz's mechanical multiplier likewise worked by a system of gears and dials. Leibniz also formulated a model that may be considered the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers. In De Arte Combinatoria (1666) Leibniz argued that all reasoning, all discover, verbal or not, is reducible to an ordered combination of elements, such as numbers, words, colors, or sounds. Further improvements in the field of early computing devices were made by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchmen. His arithometer could not only add and multiply, but perform the four basic arithmetic functions and was widely used up until the First World War.

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The 18th Century: Powered Machines and the Industrial Revolution The invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1776 represented a major advance in the development of powered machines. It was first applied to an industrial operation - the spinning of cotton - in 1785. A new kind of work-slave it not only marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but also the coming age of mass production. In the England of the 18th century five important inventions in the textile industry advanced the automation of work processes. 1) John Kay's flying shuttle in 1733 , which permitted the weaving of larger widths of cloth and significantly increased weaving speed, 2) Edmund Cartwright's power loom in 1785, which increased weaving speed still further, 3) James Hargreaves' spinning jenny in 1764, 4) Richard Arkwright's water frame and 5) Samuel Crompton's spinning mule in 1779, whereby the last three inventions improved the speed and quality of thread-spinning operations. Those developments, combined with the invention of the steam engine, in short time led to the creation of new machine-slaves and the mechanization of the production of most major goods, such as iron, paper, leather, glass and bricks. Large-scale machine production was soon applied in many manufacturing sectors and resulted in a reduction of production costs. Yet the widespread use of the novel work-slaves also led to new demands concerning the work force's qualifications. The utilization of machines enabled a differentiated kind of division of labor and eventuated in a (further) specialization of skills. While before many goods were produced by skilled craftsmen the use of modern machinery increased the demand for semiskilled and unskilled workers. Also, the nature of the work process altered from one mainly dependent on physical power to one primarily dominated by technology and an increasing proportion of the labor force employed to operate machines.

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1940s - Early 1950s: First Generation Computers Probably the most important contributor concerning the theoretical basis for the digital computers that were developed in the 1940s was Alan Turing, an English mathematician and logician. In 1936 he created the Turing machine, which was originally conceived as a mathematical tool that could infallibly recognize undecidable propositions. Although he instead proved that there cannot exist any universal method of determination, Turing's machine represented an idealized mathematical model that reduced the logical structure of any computing device to its essentials. His basic scheme of an input/output device, memory, and central processing unit became the basis for all subsequent digital computers. The onset of the Second World War led to an increased funding for computer projects, which hastened technical progress, as governments sought to develop computers to exploit their potential strategic importance. By 1941 the German engineer Konrad Zuse had developed a computer, the Z3, to design airplanes and missiles. Two years later the British completed a secret code-breaking computer called Colossus to decode German messages and by 1944 the Harvard engineer Howard H. Aiken had produced an all-electronic calculator, whose purpose was to create ballistic charts for the U.S. Navy. Also spurred by the war the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), a general-purpose computer, was produced by a partnership between the U.S. government and the University of Pennsylvania (1943). Consisting of 18.000 vacuum tubes, 70.000 resistors and 5 million soldered joints, the computer was such a massive piece of machinery (floor space: 1,000 square feet) that it consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power, enough energy to dim lights in an entire section of a bigger town. Concepts in computer design that remained central to computer engineering for the next 40 years were developed by the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann in the mid-1940s. By 1945 he created the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) with a memory to hold both a stored program as well as data. The key element of the Neumann architecture was the central processing unit (CPU), which allowed all computer functions to be coordinated through a single source. One of the first commercially available computers to take advantage of the development of the CPU was the UNIVAC I (1951). Both the U.S. Census bureau and General Electric owned UNIVACs (Universal Automatic Computer). Characteristic for first generation computers was the fact, that instructions were made-to-order for the specific task for which the computer was to be used. Each computer had a different binary-coded program called a machine language that told it how to operate. Therefore computers were difficult to program and limited in versatility and speed. Another feature of early computers was that they used vacuum tubes and magnetic drums for storage.

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Movies as a Propaganda- and Disinformation-Tool in World War I and II Movies produced in Hollywood in 1918/19 were mainly anti-German. They had some influence but the bigger effect was reached in World War II-movies. The first propaganda movie of World War II was British. At that time all films had to pass censoring. Most beloved were entertaining movies with propaganda messages. The enemy was shown as a beast, an animal-like creature, a brutal person without soul and as an idiot. Whereas the own people were the heroes. That was the new form of atrocity. Leni Riefenstahl was a genius in this respect. Her movies still have an incredible power, while the majority of the other movies of that time look ridiculous today. The combination of light and shadow, the dramatic music and the mass-scenes that resembled ballet, had its effect and political consequences. Some of the German movies of that period still are on the index. U.S.-President Theodore Roosevelt considered movies the best propaganda-instrument, as they are more subtle than other tools. In the late twenties, movies got more and more important, in the USSR, too, like Sergei Eisenstein demonstrated with his movies. Historic events were changed into symbolism, exactly the way propaganda should function. It was disinformation - but in its most artistic form, especially in comparison to most U.S.- and European movies of that time.

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George Boole b. Nov. 2, 1815, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England d. Dec. 8, 1864, Ballintemple, County Cork, Ireland English mathematician who helped establish modern symbolic logic and whose algebra of logic, now called Boolean algebra, is basic to the design of digital computer circuits. One of the first Englishmen to write on logic, Boole pointed out the analogy between the algebraic symbols and those that can represent logical forms and syllogisms, showing how the symbols of quantity can be separated from those of operation. With Boole in 1847 and 1854 began the algebra of logic, or what is now called Boolean algebra. It is basically two-valued in that it involves a subdivision of objects into separate classes, each with a given property. Different classes can then be treated as to the presence or absence of the same property.

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Integrated circuit Also called microcircuit, the integrated circuit is an assembly of electronic components, fabricated as a single unit, in which active semiconductor devices (transistors and diodes) and passive devices (capacitors and resistors) and their interconnections are built up on a chip of material called a substrate (most commonly made of silicon). The circuit thus consists of a unitary structure with no connecting wires. The individual circuit elements are microscopic in size.

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Punch card, 1801 Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, an engineer and architect in Lyon, France, the punch cards laid the ground for automatic information processing. For the first time information was stored in binary format on perforated cardboard cards. In 1890 Hermann Hollerith used Joseph-Marie Jacquard's punch card technology for processing statistical data retrieved from the US census in 1890, thus speeding up data analysis from eight to three years. His application of Jacquard's invention was also used for programming computers and data processing until electronic data processing was introduced in the 1960's. - As with writing and calculating, administrative purposes account for the beginning of modern automatic data processing. Paper tapes are a medium similar to Jacquard's punch cards. In 1857 Sir Charles Wheatstone applied them as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data for the first time. By their means, telegraph messages could be prepared off-line, sent ten times quicker (up to 400 words per minute), and stored. Later similar paper tapes were used for programming computers.

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Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the simulation of human thinking and emotions in information technology. AI develops "intelligent systems" capable, for example, of learning and logical deduction. AI systems are used for creatively handling large amounts of data (as in data mining), as well as in natural speech processing and image recognition. AI is also used as to support decision taking in highly complex environments. Yahoo AI sites: http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Computer_Science/Artificial_Intelligence/ MIT AI lab: http://www.ai.mit.edu/ http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Computer_Science... http://www.ai.mit.edu/

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Binary number system In mathematics, the term binary number system refers to a positional numeral system employing 2 as the base and requiring only two different symbols, 0 and 1. The importance of the binary system to information theory and computer technology derives mainly from the compact and reliable manner in which data can be represented in electromechanical devices with two states--such as "on-off," "open-closed," or "go-no go."

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Machine language Initially computer programmers had to write instructions in machine language. This coded language, which can be understood and executed directly by the computer without conversion or translation, consists of binary digits representing operation codes and memory addresses. Because it is made up of strings of 1s and 0s, machine language is difficult for humans to use.

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