Jonathan Hoon's post

Surprisingly, the origins of computers have never been addressed at any other time in a classroom. From elementary school until now, computer classes have always been focused on teaching skills so that I would be able to learn how to use the newest form of technology available. For this reason, the history of computers never seemed like an issue worth analyzing because its kind of hard to even imagine life before there was word processing or computer games. Babbage’s Difference Engine from the 1810’s seems just as revolutionary to read about now, as it must have been when it had just come out. Modern education seems to address technology only so far as the development of transportation from trains to automobiles to airplanes.

Whenever the computer is introduced, this is seemingly too contemporary to even worth addressing in the classroom. The mechanical background of figuring out how to make computations with the difference machines through the use of levers still seems revolutionary and beyond my own intellectual ability to grasp. However, Thomas Edison never had not even introduced the use of an electrical system for another 70 years, which seems even more astonishing when put compared with this high level of technological innovation.

When Babbage debates how to use a lever to actually predict the carriage of the 10’s place in the Analytical Engine, I have to remind myself that he must be thinking similar to a watchmaker or a mechanic. The transition of these “basic” publications helps to reflect how the theoretical notion allowed for the “automata theory” from the 1930’s to become even conceivable. To imagine making a machine that performs decisions based on a numerical order through the use of levers and electricity must have been a fantastical and purely intellectual endeavor even in the early 20^th century. I still find that the transition of these ideas to the modern computer to be a mystery more than a logical progression of ideas. These complexly layered discoveries probably explain why this type of technological history has always been skimmed over in all my history and science classes growing up.