# COMPUTING / a brief history Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-tech-computing-history Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-tech-computing-history/raw Category: Technology Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:46.968Z Tags: catalog, tech, computing, history ## Summary 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. ## Slide Outline 1. COMPUTING 2. BABBAGE'S ANALYTICAL ENGINE 3. TURING'S UNIVERSAL MACHINE 4. ENIAC & THE STORED PROGRAM 5. THE TRANSISTOR 6. FORTRAN — A LANGUAGE FOR HUMANS 7. UNIX & THE C LANGUAGE 8. INTEL 4004 — A CPU ON A CHIP 9. THE PERSONAL COMPUTER 10. THE WORLD WIDE WEB 11. iPHONE — A COMPUTER IN EVERY POCKET 12. GPUs & THE DEEP-LEARNING RENAISSANCE 13. FURTHER READING ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: COMPUTING - IBM 5081 / FORM C/3 — DECK 001 - / A BRIEF HISTORY - FROM BABBAGE TO NEURAL NETWORKS ### Slide 2: 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 3: 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 4: 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 5: 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 6: 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 7: 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 - int main(void) { - printf("hello, world\n"); - return 0; - $ cc hello.c -o hello - $ ./hello - hello, world - $ _ - FIG. 6 — VT100 SESSION, c. 1978 ### Slide 8: 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 9: 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. - - Hypertext - -

Welcome to the WWW

- - Read more - - - - 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 // ## Related Decks - [THE INTERNET // A FIFTY-YEAR HISTORY](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-tech-internet-history) - [AI — The Road to General Intelligence](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-tech-ai-revolution) - [Biotechnology — Editing biology like software](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-tech-biotech) - [Cryptography / Declassified](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-tech-cryptography)