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COMPUTING / a brief history

Charles Babbage designed a mechanical, general-purpose computer with a "mill" (CPU), "store" (memory), and punched-card input — over a century before the...

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This Shipslides page presents COMPUTING / a brief history as an interactive HTML presentation deck in the Technology catalog with 13 slides. The share page keeps the uploaded deck sandboxed while exposing readable context, topics, and a slide outline for viewers and search engines.

Charles Babbage designed a mechanical, general-purpose computer with a "mill" (CPU), "store" (memory), and punched-card input — over a century before the electronic computer. Key sections include: COMPUTING; BABBAGE'S ANALYTICAL ENGINE; TURING'S UNIVERSAL MACHINE; ENIAC & THE STORED PROGRAM; THE TRANSISTOR; FORTRAN — A LANGUAGE FOR HUMANS; UNIX & THE C LANGUAGE; INTEL 4004 — A CPU ON A CHIP; THE PERSONAL COMPUTER; THE WORLD WIDE WEB.

Key sections

  • 01COMPUTING
  • 02BABBAGE'S ANALYTICAL ENGINE
  • 03TURING'S UNIVERSAL MACHINE
  • 04ENIAC & THE STORED PROGRAM
  • 05THE TRANSISTOR
  • 06FORTRAN — A LANGUAGE FOR HUMANS
  • 07UNIX & THE C LANGUAGE
  • 08INTEL 4004 — A CPU ON A CHIP
  • 09THE PERSONAL COMPUTER
  • 10THE WORLD WIDE WEB
  • 11iPHONE — A COMPUTER IN EVERY POCKET
  • 12GPUs & THE DEEP-LEARNING RENAISSANCE
  • 13FURTHER READING

Topics covered

catalogtechcomputinghistory

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Slide outline
  1. 01COMPUTING
  2. 02BABBAGE'S ANALYTICAL ENGINE
  3. 03TURING'S UNIVERSAL MACHINE
  4. 04ENIAC & THE STORED PROGRAM
  5. 05THE TRANSISTOR
  6. 06FORTRAN — A LANGUAGE FOR HUMANS
  7. 07UNIX & THE C LANGUAGE
  8. 08INTEL 4004 — A CPU ON A CHIP
  9. 09THE PERSONAL COMPUTER
  10. 10THE WORLD WIDE WEB
  11. 11iPHONE — A COMPUTER IN EVERY POCKET
  12. 12GPUs & THE DEEP-LEARNING RENAISSANCE
  13. 13FURTHER READING
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https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-tech-computing-history
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Technology
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Updated
2026-05-17
LLM text
https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-tech-computing-history/llms.txt

Presentation Transcript

Detailed slide-by-slide text content extracted from this presentation.

Slide 01

COMPUTING

  • IBM 5081 / FORM C/3 — DECK 001
  • / A BRIEF HISTORY
  • FROM BABBAGE TO NEURAL NETWORKS
Slide 02

BABBAGE'S ANALYTICAL ENGINE

  • SLIDE 021837LONDON
  • 1837
  • The first programmable computer (on paper)
  • Charles Babbage designed a mechanical, general-purpose computer with a "mill" (CPU), "store" (memory), and punched-card input — over a century before the electronic computer.
  • Ada Lovelace, translating notes for Babbage, wrote what is now considered the first computer algorithm: a method for computing Bernoulli numbers on the engine.
  • "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." — Ada Lovelace, 1843
  • FIG. 1 — DIFFERENCE GEARS, MILL & STORE
Slide 03

TURING'S UNIVERSAL MACHINE

  • SLIDE 031936CAMBRIDGE
  • 1936
  • "On Computable Numbers" — the birth of theoretical CS
  • Alan Turing's paper introduced an abstract machine reading symbols off an infinite tape — proving that a single "universal" device could simulate any computation.
  • Solved the Entscheidungsproblem in the negative — some problems are undecidable.
  • Defined the limits of mechanical computation.
  • Laid the groundwork for stored-program machines a decade later.
  • "We may compare a man in the process of computing... to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions."
  • FIG. 2 — TURING MACHINE TAPE
Slide 04

ENIAC & THE STORED PROGRAM

  • SLIDE 041945U. PENN
  • 1945
  • 30 tons, 17,468 vacuum tubes, 5,000 add/sec
  • ENIAC (1945) — built by Eckert & Mauchly — was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Programming it meant rewiring it.
  • John von Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC codified the architecture we still use: a single memory storing both data and instructions. CPU + memory + I/O.
  • Six women — Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, Fran Bilas — were ENIAC's first programmers.
  • Calculated artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army.
  • FIG. 3 — ENIAC PATCH ARRAY
Slide 05

THE TRANSISTOR

  • SLIDE 051947BELL LABS
  • DEC 23, 1947
  • Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley — switching with no moving parts
  • At Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the first point-contact transistor — a sliver of germanium that could amplify and switch electrical signals. William Shockley followed with the more practical junction transistor.
  • Replaced fragile, hot, power-hungry vacuum tubes.
  • Enabled miniaturization — the road to the integrated circuit.
  • Nobel Prize in Physics, 1956.
  • A vacuum tube the size of your fist becomes a speck the size of a grain of sand.
  • FIG. 4 — VACUUM TUBE vs. TRANSISTOR
Slide 06

FORTRAN — A LANGUAGE FOR HUMANS

  • SLIDE 061957IBM
  • 1957
  • John Backus's team at IBM — first widely used HLL
  • Before FORTRAN, programmers wrote in machine code or assembler — error-prone, machine-specific, glacial. FORTRAN ("FORmula TRANslation") let scientists and engineers write equations almost as they appear on paper, and a compiler emitted optimized IBM 704 code.
  • Productivity jumped roughly 20×.
  • Inspired ALGOL, COBOL, BASIC, C — every language since.
  • Still in use today for high-performance numerical work.
  • C COMPUTE SUM OF SQUARES
  • DIMENSION A(100)
  • SUM = 0.0
  • DO 10 I = 1, N
  • 10 SUM = SUM + A(I)**2
  • WRITE(6, 20) SUM
  • 20 FORMAT(1H , 'TOTAL = ', F10.2)
  • STOP
  • END
  • FIG. 5 — FORTRAN II SOURCE LISTING
Slide 07

UNIX & THE C LANGUAGE

  • SLIDE 071969 / 1972BELL LABS
  • 1969 — 1972
  • Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan — the toolbox philosophy
  • Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie built UNIX on a discarded PDP-7, then re-wrote it in 1972 in a new portable language: C. Together they defined modern systems software.
  • Hierarchical file system, pipes, small composable tools.
  • "Write programs that do one thing and do it well."
  • C made operating systems portable — UNIX spread to every architecture.
  • Direct ancestor of Linux, macOS, iOS, Android.
  • "UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity." — Dennis Ritchie
  • $ cat hello.c
  • #include <stdio.h>
  • int main(void) {
  • printf("hello, world\n");
  • return 0;
  • $ cc hello.c -o hello
  • $ ./hello
  • hello, world
  • $ _
  • FIG. 6 — VT100 SESSION, c. 1978
Slide 08

INTEL 4004 — A CPU ON A CHIP

  • SLIDE 08NOV 15, 1971SANTA CLARA
  • 1971
  • 2,300 transistors. 740 kHz. 4-bit. Everything changes.
  • Designed by Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor for a Japanese calculator company (Busicom), the 4004 packed an entire CPU onto a single piece of silicon — 12 mm². Moore's Law was already in motion.
  • 2,300 transistors → today's chips have 100+ billion.
  • Made microcomputers, embedded systems, and the personal computer possible.
  • The first time computing power could be sold by the gram.
  • FIG. 7 — INTEL 4004 MICROPROCESSOR
Slide 09

THE PERSONAL COMPUTER

  • SLIDE 091975 — 77SILICON VALLEY
  • 1975 — 1977
  • Altair 8800 / Apple II / Commodore PET / TRS-80
  • The MITS Altair 8800 (Jan 1975, $397 kit) lit the fuse — Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC for it and founded Microsoft. Two years later "the 1977 trinity" arrived: the Apple II (Wozniak/Jobs), the Commodore PET (Chuck Peddle), and the TRS-80 (Tandy).
  • Computers moved from labs and basements onto kitchen tables.
  • Hobbyist computer clubs (Homebrew Computer Club) became the seed culture of Silicon Valley.
  • VisiCalc (1979) — the first killer app — sold the Apple II to business.
  • FIG. 8 — 80-COLUMN PUNCH CARD
Slide 10

THE WORLD WIDE WEB

  • SLIDE 101989CERN
  • MARCH 1989
  • Tim Berners-Lee, "Information Management: A Proposal"
  • Working at CERN, Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext system to link documents across the lab's mismatched computers. By 1990 he had written the first browser, the first web server, and HTML, HTTP, and URL specifications.
  • The web rode on top of the older Internet (TCP/IP, 1983; ARPANET, 1969).
  • CERN released the technology royalty-free in 1993.
  • Mosaic (1993) brought images and the masses.
  • "Vague but exciting..." — Berners-Lee's manager, on the original proposal.
  • <HTML>
  • <HEAD><TITLE>Hypertext</TITLE></HEAD>
  • <BODY>
  • <H1>Welcome to the WWW</H1>
  • <A HREF="http://info.cern.ch/">
  • Read more
  • </A>
  • </BODY>
  • </HTML>
  • FIG. 9 — HTML 1.0, c. 1991
Slide 11

iPHONE — A COMPUTER IN EVERY POCKET

  • SLIDE 11JAN 9, 2007MACWORLD
  • 2007
  • "An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator..."
  • Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld 2007. Multi-touch, full web browser, no stylus, no physical keyboard. The App Store followed in 2008 — and an entire economy of developers with it.
  • By 2024, ~7 billion smartphones in active use globally.
  • More compute in your pocket than the entire Apollo program had on Earth.
  • Reframed computing from a desk activity to an ambient one.
  • "Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone." — Steve Jobs
  • FIG. 10 — POCKET COMPUTER, 2007
Slide 12

GPUs & THE DEEP-LEARNING RENAISSANCE

  • SLIDE 122012 →TORONTO / CA / WORLD
  • 2012 — present
  • AlexNet, ImageNet, Transformers, GPT
  • In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton's "AlexNet" won ImageNet by a country mile — trained on two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs. Suddenly, the neural networks of the 1980s worked, given enough data and parallel silicon.
  • 2014 — GANs. 2017 — Transformers ("Attention Is All You Need").
  • 2020 — GPT-3. 2022 — ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion.
  • Compute used in frontier training runs has doubled roughly every 6 months.
  • The microprocessor of 1971 → 100B-transistor data-center GPUs.
  • From punched cards to learned weights — but it is still, beneath it all, a Turing machine.
  • FIG. 11 — A FEED-FORWARD NETWORK
Slide 13

FURTHER READING

  • SLIDE 13END OF DECK// EOF
  • // continue the trace
  • BOOKS
  • The Innovators — Walter Isaacson
  • Hackers — Steven Levy
  • Turing's Cathedral — George Dyson
  • The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy Kidder
  • Ada's Algorithm — James Essinger
  • The Dream Machine — M. Mitchell Waldrop
  • YOUTUBE — VIDEO REFERENCES
  • youtube.com/results?search_query=history+of+computers
  • youtube.com/results?search_query=alan+turing+computing
  • INSTITUTIONS
  • Computer History Museum — computerhistory.org
  • Bletchley Park & TNMOC — UK
  • Bell Labs Archive — Murray Hill, NJ
  • // END OF DECK //
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