The Prehistory of Computing, Part II
The Prehistory of Computing, Part II In part I of this two-part series we covered lookup tables and simple devices with at most a handful of moving parts. This time we’ll pick up in the 17th centuries, when computing devices started to became far more complex and the groundwork for later theoretical work began to be laid. Pascal We enter the era of mechanical calculators in 1642 when Pascal invented a machine, charmingly called the pascaline, which could perform addition and subtraction: The