World First Computer Programma 101

Pier Giorgio Perotto

The Programma 101, also known as Perottina, was the first commercial "desktop computer".Produced by Italian manufacturer Olivetti, based in Piedmont, and invented by the Italian engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto. It was launched at the 1964 New York World's Fair, volume production started in 1965. A futuristic design for its time, the Programma 101 was priced at $3,200 ($23,000 if adjusted to 2011). About 44,000 units were sold, primarily in the US.

It is usually called a printing programmable calculator or desktop calculator because three years later the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a model that took inspiration from the P101, was advertised by HP as a "portable calculator", in order to be able to overcome the fears of computers and be able to sell it to corporations without passing through the corporate computer department.Although, the concept of "stored program" allows this machine to be considered a true computer.

Programming was similar to assembly language, but simpler, as there were fewer options. It directed the exchange between memory registers and calculation registers, and operations in the registers.The stored programs could be recorded onto plastic cards approximately 10 cm × 20 cm that had a magnetic coating on one side and an area for writing on the other. Each card could be recorded on two stripes, enabling it to store two programs. All ten registers were stored on the card, allowing programs to use up to ten stored 11-digit constants.

The program to calculate logarithms occupied both stripes of one magnetic card.It was designed by Olivetti engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto in Ivrea. The styling, attributed to Marco Zanuso but in reality by Mario Bellini, was ergonomical and innovative for the time, and earned Bellini the Compasso d'Oro Industrial Design Award.

The Programma 101

The Programma 101 was able to calculate the basic four arithmetic functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), plus square root, absolute value, and fractional part. Also clear, transfer, exchange, and stop for input. There were 16 jump instructions and 16 conditional jump instructions. 32 label statements were available as destinations for the 32 jump instructions and/or the four start keys (V, W, Y, Z).Each full register held a 22-digit number with sign and decimal point.Its memory consisted of 10 registers: three for operations (M, A, R); two for storage (B, C); three for storage and/or program (assignable as needed: D, E, F); and two for program only (p1, p2). Five of the registers (B, C, D, E, F) could be subdivided into half-registers, containing an 11-digit number with sign and decimal point. When used for programming, each full register stored 24 instructions.It printed programs and results onto a roll of paper tape, similar to calculator or cash register paper.

Developed between 1962 and 1964, it was saved from the sale of the computer division to GE thanks to an employee who one night changed the internal categorization of the product from "computer" to "calculator", leaving the small team in Olivetti and creating some awkward situations in the office, since the building except that office was then owned by GE.The Programma 101 was launched at the 1964 New York World's Fair, attracting major interest. 40,000 units were sold; 90% of them in the United States where the sale price was $3,200(increasing to about $3,500 in 1968.)

Hewlett-Packard was ordered to pay about $900,000 ($6.74 million in present day terms) in royalties to Olivetti after copying some of the solutions adopted in Programma 101, like the magnetic card and the architecture, in the HP 9100.

About Programma 101 were sold to NASA and used to plan the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.By Apollo 11 we had a desktop computer, sort of, kind of, called an Olivetti Programma 101. It was a kind of supercalculator. It was probably a foot and a half square, and about maybe eight inches tall. It would add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but it would remember a sequence of these things, and it would record that sequence on a magnetic card, a magnetic strip that was about a foot long and two inches wide. So you could write a sequence, a programming sequence, and load it in there, and the if you would — the Lunar Module high-gain antenna was not very smart, it didn't know where Earth was. We would have to run four separate programs on this Programma 101 David W. Whittle, 2006 

The 101 is mentioned as part of the system used by the US Air Force to compute coordinates for ground directed bombing of B-52 Stratofortress targets during the Vietnam War.

The Worlds First Computer Game Developer William Higinbotham

William Higinbotham

The invention was a tennis game simulated by a few resistors, capacitors, relays and transistors that reacted with the controller in order to make a ball bounce back and forth on the black and white screen, just like in a tennis game. The actual players couldn't be seen, actually they didn't exist at all, they were there theoretically but didn't show up on the screen. The only way the player became aware of his position was remembering the last impact with the ball, as far as I could realize. I may be wrong.

That's because 1958 is the actual year when the world's first computerized game was created by William Higinbotham. Manipulating the motion on a screen using an analog controller was something the world had never seen before and the man became famous for it.

Even if the game was created in 1958, it was pretty good for its time, I must say. The ball was affected by gravity much like in real life, and to make it even more realistic, players had to carefully launch it over the net into the adversary's court. The perspective was a 2 dimensional one obviously, and player's were playing it watching from the side (not looking at the court from above).

The game was invented with the purpose to cure the boredom of visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory, in which Mr. Higinbotham worked. The game was only brought out twice, on "Visitor's Day" at the power plant. Tennis for Two was the predecessor of PONG, one of the most widely recognized video games as well as one of the first

So what happened to Higinbotham's video tennis game? He improved it for Visitor's Day 1959, letting people play Tennis for Two in Earth gravity, or low gravity like on the moon, or very high gravity like that found on Jupiter. 

Tennis Game

Then when Visitor's Day was over, he took the video game apart and put the pieces away. He never brought them out again, never built another video game, and never patented the idea. 

Willy Higinbotham would probably be completely forgotten today were it not for a lawsuit. When video games began taking off in the early 1970s, Magnavox and some other early manufacturers began fighting in court of which one of them had invented the games. A patent lawyer for one of Magnavox's competitors eventually learned of Higinbotham's story and brought the Great Man into court to prove that he, not Magnavox, was the true founder of the video game. 

In 2001, Americans spent more on video game systems and software -$9.4 billion- than they did going to the movies -$8.35 billion. What did Higinbotham, who died in 1994, have to show for it? Nothing. He never made a penny off his invention. Not that he could have- he worked for a government laboratory when he invented the game, so even if he had patented the idea, the U.S. government would have owned the patent. 

Be amazed at what 1958 technology was giving birth to the world's first computer video game..

The Father of Computer Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage,26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871 was an English polymath. He was a mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, who is best remembered now for originating the concept of a programmable computer.Considered a "father of the computer",Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. His varied work in other fields has led him to be described as "pre-eminent" among the many polymaths of his century.

Parts of Babbage's uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked.Babbage's machines were among the first mechanical computers. That they were not actually completed was largely because of funding problems and personality issues.Babbage directed the building of some steam-powered machines that achieved some modest success, suggesting that calculations could be mechanised. For more than ten years he received government funding for his project, which amounted to £17,000, but eventually the Treasury lost confidence in him.

While Babbage's machines were mechanical and unwieldy, their basic architecture was similar to a modern computer. The data and program memory were separated, operation was instruction-based, the control unit could make conditional jumps, and the machine had a separate I/O unit.Background on mathematical tables

In Babbage's time, printed mathematical tables were calculated by human computers, in other words by hand. They were central to navigation, science and engineering, as well as mathematics. Mistakes were known to occur in transcription as well as calculation.

At Cambridge, Babbage saw the fallibility of this process, and the opportunity of adding mechanisation into its management. His own account of his path towards mechanical computation references a particular occasion.In 1812 he was sitting in his rooms in the Analytical Society looking at a table of logarithms, which he knew to be full of mistakes, when the idea occurred to him of computing all tabular functions by machinery. The French government had produced several tables by a new method. Three or four of their mathematicians decided how to compute the tables, half a dozen more broke down the operations into simple stages, and the work itself, which was restricted to addition and subtraction, was done by eighty computers who knew only these two arithmetical processes. Here, for the first time, mass production was applied to arithmetic, and Babbage was seized by the idea that the labours of the unskilled computers could be taken over completely by machinery which would be quicker and more reliable.

There was another period, seven years later, when his interest was aroused by the issues around computation of mathematical tables. The French official initiative by Gaspard de Prony, and its problems of implementation, were familiar to him. After the Napoleonic Wars came to a close, scientific contacts were renewed on the level of personal contact: in 1819 Charles Blagden was in Paris looking into the printing of the stalled de Prony project, and lobbying for the support of the Royal Society. In works of the 1820s and 1830s, Babbage referred in detail to de Prony's project.

Babbage began in 1822 with what he called the difference engine, made to compute values of polynomial functions. It was created to calculate a series of values automatically. By using the method of finite differences, it was possible to avoid the need for multiplication and division.

For a prototype difference engine, Babbage brought in Joseph Clement to implement the design, in 1823. Clement worked to high standards, but his machine tools were particularly elaborate. Under the standard terms of business of the time, he could charge for their construction, and would also own them. He and Babbage fell out over costs around 1831.

Some parts of the prototype survive in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.This prototype evolved into the "first difference engine." It remained unfinished and the finished portion is located at the Science Museum in London. This first difference engine would have been composed of around 25,000 parts, weigh fifteen tons (13,600 kg), and would have been 8 ft (2.4 m) tall. Although Babbage received ample funding for the project, it was never completed. He later (1847–1849) produced detailed drawings for an improved version,"Difference Engine No. 2", but did not receive funding from the British government. His design was finally constructed in 1989–1991, using his plans and 19th century manufacturing tolerances. It performed its first calculation at the London Science Museum, returning results to 31 digits.

Nine years later, the Science Museum completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine.

The World First Computer Programmer Ada Lovalace

Ada Lovalace

Ada Byron was the daughter of a brief marriage between the Romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, who separated from Byron just a month after Ada was born. Four months later, Byron left England forever. Ada never met her father (who died in Greece in 1823) and was raised by her mother, Lady Byron. Her life was an apotheosis of struggle between emotion and reason, subjectivism and objectivism, poetics and mathematics, ill health and bursts of energy.

Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father, and she saw to it that Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music, as disciplines to counter dangerous poetic tendencies. But Ada's complex inheritance became apparent as early as 1828, when she produced the design for a flying machine. It was mathematics that gave her life its wings.

Lady Byron and Ada moved in an elite London society, one in which gentlemen not members of the clergy or occupied with politics or the affairs of a regiment were quite likely to spend their time and fortunes pursuing botany, geology, or astronomy. In the early nineteenth century there were no "professional" scientists.But the participation of noblewomen in intellectual pursuits was not widely encouraged.

One of the gentlemanly scientists of the era was to become Ada's lifelong friend. Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was known as the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine that operated by the method of finite differences. Ada met Babbage in 1833, when she was just 17, and they began a voluminous correspondence on the topics of mathematics, logic, and ultimately all subjects.

In 1835, Ada married William King, ten years her senior, and when King inherited a noble title in 1838, they became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace. Ada had three children. The family and its fortunes were very much directed by Lady Byron, whose domineering was rarely opposed by King.

Babbage had made plans in 1834 for a new kind of calculating machine (although the Difference Engine was not finished), an Analytical Engine. His Parliamentary sponsors refused to support a second machine with the first unfinished, but Babbage found sympathy for his new project abroad. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine. Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for the memoir, and during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked feverishly on the article and a set of Notes she appended to it. These are the source of her enduring fame.

Babbage Difference Engine

Ada called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)," and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for "developing  and tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity." Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.

Ada died of cancer in 1852, at the age of 37, and was buried beside the father she never knew. Her contributions to science were resurrected only recently, but many new biographies* attest to the fascination of Babbage's "Enchantress of Numbers."

The Father Of Automatic Computation Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith (1860-1929)

Herman Hollerith is widely regarded as the father of modern automatic computation. He choose the punched card as the basis for storing and processing information and he built the first punched-card tabulating and sorting machines as well as the first key punch, and he founded the company that was to become IBM. Hollerith's designs dominated the computing landscape for almost 100 years.

The idea of this was born from the conductor who was punching the ticket in train which contain the information about the travel in ticket both the up and down station and male or female and other categories so from that his ideas were born.

After receiving his Engineer of Mines degree at age 19, Hollerith worked on the 1880 US census, a laborious and error-prone operation that cried out for mechanization.

After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards (pioneered in the to record information, and designed special equipment  a tabulator and sorter  to tally the results. His designs won the competition for the 1890 US census, chosen for their ability to count combined facts.

Herman Hollerith Tablulation Machine

 These machines reduced a ten-year job to three months saved the 1890 taxpayers five million dollars, and earned him an 1890 Columbia PhD.This was the first wholly successful information processing system to replace pen and paper. Hollerith's machines were also used for censuses in Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and again in the US census of 1900. In 1911 Hollerith's company merged with several others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924.

Between the 1880 and 1890 censuses, Hollerith spent a year (1882) on the Mechanical Engineering faculty at MIT, and then in the mid-1880s worked on railroad braking systems, obtaining several patents for both electromagnetic pneumatic brakes and vacuum operated brakes, as well as for corrugated metal tubing.His inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry.