Basic Computing Periods - Ages
Instructor: Mhay Arenio
Premechanical
The pre mechanical age is the earliest age of information technology. It can be defined as
the time between 3000B.C. and 1450A.D. We are talking about a long time ago.
Petroglyphs are rock carvings (rock
paintings are called pictographs)
made by pecking directly on the
rock surface using a stone chisel
and a hammerstone.
The Phoenician alphabet is an
abjad (consonantal alphabet)
used across the Mediterranean
civilization of Phoenicia for most
of the 1st millennium BC.
As alphabets became more popular and
more people were writing information
down, pens and paper began to be
developed. It started off as just marks in
wet clay, but later paper was created out
of papyrus plant. The most popular kind
of paper made was probably by the
Chinese who made paper from rags.
Around 100A.D. was when the first 1-9 system was created by people from India.
However, it wasn’t until 875A.D. (775 years later) that the number 0 was invented.
And yes, now that numbers were created, people wanted stuff to do with them, so
they created calculators. A calculator was the very first sign of an information
processor.
The popular model of that time was the abacus.
Mechanical
● The mechanical age is when we first start to see
connections between our current technology and its
ancestors.
● The mechanical age can be defined as the time
between 1450 and 1840.
● Blaise Pascal invented the Pascaline which was a
very popular
● mechanical computer. Charles Babbage developed
the difference engine which tabulated
● polynomial equations using the method of finite
differences.
Electromechanical
● The electromechanical age can be
defined as the time between 1840
and [Link] are the beginnings
of telecommunication.
● The telegraph was created in the
early 1800s. Morse code was created
by Samuel Morse in 1835.
Morse code is a telecommunications method
which encodes text characters as standardized
sequences of two different signal durations,
called dots and dashes, or dits and dahs. Morse
code is named after Samuel Morse, one of the
early developers of the system adopted for
electrical telegraphy.
The telephone (one of the most popular forms
of communication ever) was created by
Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. The first radio
developed by Guglielmo Marconi in 1894.
Electronic
● The electronic age is what we currently live in. It can be defined as
the time between 1940 and right now.
● The ENIAC was the first high-speed, digital computer capable of
being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems.
● This computer was designed to be used by the U.S. Army for
artillery firing tables. This machine was even bigger than the
● Mark 1 taking up 680 square feet and weighing 30 tons - HUGE. It
mainly used vacuum tubes to do its calculations.
There are 4 main sections of digital computing
The first was the era of
vacuum tubes and punch
cards like the ENIAC and
Mark 1.
The second generation replaced vacuum tubes with
transistors, punch cards were replaced with magnetic
tape, and rotating magnetic drums were replaced by
magnetic cores for internal storage.
The third generation
replaced transistors
with integrated circuits,
magnetic tape was
used throughout all
computers, and
magnetic core turned
into metal oxide
semiconductors.
The fourth and latest generation brought In CPUs
(central processing units) which contained memory,
logic, and control circuits all on a single chip.
The personal computer was developed
(Apple II). The graphical user interface
(GUI) was developed.
