Computing

From pebbles in sand trays to the machines that now hold the world together — told one milestone at a time.

10 posts· 2300 BCE – 1843

• Ada Lovelace's Notes on an engine that never ran 1843
• Babbage's Difference Engine, or the most expensive one-seventh of a calculator 1822
• The Jacquard loom, or how a silk weaver programmed a machine 1804
• Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner, or what a pedometer started 1694
• Pascal's Pascaline, or how a teenager tried to spare his father from arithmetic 1642
• The slide rule, or how a clergyman's shortcut ran the world for three centuries 1622
• Napier's bones, or how a Scottish laird made multiplication optional 1617
• Al-Khwarizmi, or how a name became a word 820 CE
• The Antikythera mechanism, or the computer the sea kept 100 BCE
• The abacus, or how humanity learned to compute with pebbles 2300 BCE