My first IT article in Vientiane, 19th June 2010

My first IT article in Vientiane Times, a well-known English newspaper, was published on the 19th June, 2010.
I will be covering topics in computer and its technology ranging from the first in the history of computers to software development in Lao PDR. The subjects should be of the computer/network/Internet securities, software for banking, software for the government and education, database development, Internet usage and its benefits, Lao software development, and last but not least, the most important one, is of the Open Source software for Lao PDR as a whole.

I welcome any suggestions or comments of my style of writing or anything that needs to be improved.I can be reached at anousak@gmail.com

History of computers (Two part series)

Computers has come a long way. Let's examine and start from the beginning and see how much we have developed since the first computer come to realized.

(deleted most of the contents, extracted some contents herewith)

Starting with and described the eariest form of computer called the abacus which used for mathematical computations. Described in 1617, a Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms and his Napier's Bones which led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon. Other section described the other event in 1642, Blaise Pascal, 19 years old, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) but couldn't sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren't that accurate (at that time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the required precision). Few years after Pascal invention, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because, instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes arranged around their circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system (each drum had 10 flutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers. Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone.The other change takes place in in 1801,when the Frenchman named Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since. In 1822, the English mathematician named Charles Babbage has changed much of what it is in modern computing today the Difference Engine. The machine would be used to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. and the Analytic Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines, would be more general purpose in nature because it would be programmable, thanks to the punched card technology of Jacquard. But it was Babbage who made an important intellectual leap regarding the punched cards. Because of the connection to the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two main parts of his Analytic Engine the "Store" as known today as the hard drive and the "Mill", as both terms are used in the weaving industry. The Store was where numbers were held and the Mill was where they were "woven" into new results. These same parts are called the memory unit and the central processing unit (CPU) in the modern computers. At the same time an English lady named Ada Byron (19 years old) was a friend Babbage and was fascinated by Babbage's ideas and thru letters and meetings with Babbage she learned enough about the design of the Analytic Engine to begin fashioning programs for the still unbuilt machine. ... Ada earned her spot in history as the first computer programmer. Ada invented the subroutine and was the first to recognize the importance of looping. Ada programming language has been used in today computers around the world.

The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S. Constitution states that a census should be taken of all U.S. citizens every 10 years in order to determine the representation of the states in Congress. .. The census bureau offered a prize for an inventor to help with the 1890 census and this prize was won by Herman Hollerith, who proposed and then successfully adopted Jacquard's punched cards for the purpose of computation.

Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the results of the count. Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually became International Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew rapidly and punched cards became ubiquitous...

....continue next week.