The Universal History Of Computing: From The Ab... -

Today, we no longer hear the click of Pascal’s gears or the hum of mainframe tubes, but every time you tap a screen, you are echoing a journey that began with a single bead on a wooden frame. We have moved from calculating taxes to simulating universes, all by teaching inanimate matter how to "think."

The story shifted gears again in the 1800s with . Looking at Charles Babbage’s blueprints for the Analytical Engine—a massive, steam-powered forest of brass—she saw something Babbage didn't. While he saw a machine for numbers, Ada saw a machine for ideas . She realized that if you could represent music or art with symbols, the engine could "weave algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." She wrote the first program, dreaming of a digital future while standing in a world of gaslight. The Universal History of Computing: From the Ab...

By the mid-20th century, the gears turned into vacuum tubes and then silicon. The room-sized gave way to the microprocessor, shrinking the power of a thousand mathematicians into a chip smaller than a fingernail. Today, we no longer hear the click of