Early Computing

The abacus is one of the oldest recorded counting tools, developed around 500 BCE. It can also be viewed as an ancient mechanical computer.

A frame with wires contains beads representing different units. The beads slide up or down to aid in the computation of large numbers.

This abacus has twelve wires, allowing it to handle numbers up to 999,999,999,999. It is useful for multiplication, and the wires can be mentally grouped together so that several sums can be calculated at the same time.

Before computers became the machines we know and use today, a “computer” was a human being. Human computers performed complex mathematical problems, often working in an office environment as part of a living network of other “computers.”

Adding machines mechanized the drudgery of complex calculation and accounting tasks in the office.

This Burroughs Class 1 Model 9 adding machine allows multiplication, subtotaling—and weighs over 60 pounds.

The glass front on this adding machine is functional. Underneath the Burroughs logo is the register, which displays the total. The see-through sides are a novel bonus, allowing people to view the complex mechanisms at work.

The Curta mechanical calculator was conceived of by Curt Herzstark in 1938. Before Herzstark could build his machine, he was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he continued to work on drawings of its design.

When his camp was liberated at the end of WWII, Herzstark commissioned machinists to produce the first working models, and they soon went into production.

The Curta mechanical calculator could fit into the palm of your hand. An extremely portable machine, it was considered the most reliable option for calculation on-the-go until it was displaced by electronic calculators in the 1970s.

The origins of Hewlett Packard’s HP-35 Scientific Calculator began with a challenge. In 1971, William Hewlett dared his engineers to prove their engineering prowess by miniaturizing the company’s 9100A Desktop Calculator—a forty-pound machine—into a device small enough to fit into a shirt pocket.

The twelve or so experimental HP-35s that began as "company hacks" proved useful beyond the prototype stage, and they soon went into production.

The HP-35 (named for its 35 keys) was the world’s first handheld scientific calculator. This advanced machine was capable of processing more complex mathematical functions than any other calculator on the market at the time.

This portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard is not an etching on paper—it is finely woven silk. Woven in 1839 by Michel-Marie Carquillat on a Jacquard loom, the image celebrates the impact of new weaving technology.

To produce this design, the loom and operator ran through a “program” of approximately 24,000 punched cards over the course of eight hours.

But not everyone was excited about the impact of Jacquard’s loom. Similar to people’s distrust of computers automating work traditionally completed by humans, the Jacquard loom threatened the jobs of skilled weavers.

If you look closely, a hole from a stone smashed through Jacquard’s window represents resistance to the same technology used to weave this image.

Punch Card Technology Evolves
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In the 1960s-80s, anonymously-created programs of images stored on punch cards were circulated among computing professionals. Workers would then co-opt company resources to create print-outs of the designs contained on the cards.

This portrait of Abraham Lincoln was printed on an IBM 1403 line printer in the 1980s.

One of the earliest surviving examples of text-based art was produced on a typewriter by Flora Stacey in 1898; with the teletype, TTY and RTTY art followed; line printer art appeared in the mid-1960s; and with the emergence of computer bulletin board systems in the late 1970s, ASCII and ANSI art began to circulate.

This input device is used to read computer programs from decks of punched computer cards.

The hopper area is used to store cards, ready for input…

…once read by the computer, they are transferred over to the stacker area.

Much as the Jacquard weaving loom links to punch card computing, core memory shares a similar sense of craft tradition. Core planes were individually woven (typically by women) under the lens of a microscope.

Cores—small rings of magnetic material strung on a grid of fine wires—were programmed to either represent a binary “one” or “zero.”

This core plane was used in the UNIVAC II, a general purpose digital computer designed for business management. It featured triple the memory and was twice as fast as the UNIVAC I.

Since Jacquard’s loom developments in the early 1800s, inspired innovators have applied punch card technology to processes for record-keeping, tabulating, and computing.

Western Electric’s Card Dialer phone uses punch cards to encode business information and to communicate with corporate computers.

This phone was part of a large corporate telephone system. Each of the alphabetical cards stored useful telephone numbers; the other punch cards held programs to run on a central computer.

The DIGIAC 3020 Core Memory Computer Trainer was also rooted in a new kind of education, as computing classes became more widespread by the early 1960s. Educators used this unit to aid in teaching programming skills, to provide hands-on experience with its patchboard interface, and as a visual model through which to discuss theories of computer science.

This device was a response to the rapid growth of the 1960s computing industry, and a need to populate the market with specialized workers.

The “core memory,” visible through a small window on the DIGIAC, is an interesting feature serving no necessary function, except to provide a visual cue for the inner workings of the computer.

The IMSAI 8080 was a clone of the Altair 8800, the first mass marketed personal computer. It was a popular "kit computer," requiring assembly and programming knowledge.

An IMSAI computer appeared in the 1980 film, WarGames. Using an IMSAI, actor Matthew Broderick’s character first hacks into his school’s computer system to change a failing grade, and later accidentally triggers a nuclear war simulation program at NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

These early forms of computing—mechanical, educational, punch card, and kit-based—have all, in their various ways, contributed ideas and impactful technologies relevant to the modern computers we use today.

By the late-1970s, the home computing revolution was well underway, and people began to interact with machines in more intuitive, human-centered ways. Punch card computing began to recede in large businesses too, ultimately displaced by data storage mediums like magnetic tape.