Computer Science › Section A · Introduction to computer science › Topic A.2
A brief history of computing
The phone in your pocket descends from bead frames, brass gears, punched cards and room-sized racks of glowing tubes. Following that line shows how two separate problems were solved: storing data, and controlling the steps of an algorithm automatically.
In this topic
- Two jobs every computer does
- Gears and mechanical calculators
- Holes in cards as instructions
- Babbage and Lovelace
- Worked example: the method of differences
- Relays and vacuum tubes
- ENIAC and the stored program
- Transistors, chips and Moore's law
- Worked example: what doubling does
- Computers for everyone
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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