
![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
Humans have probably been calculating since the moment that Paleolithic hunters first used a scorched stick to scratch a record of their kills on the limestone walls of a cave.
“Rrrr! Og kill four! More than Zog!”
Fast forward a few millennia to July 7, 1752, when Joseph Marie Jacquard is born. His automated loom, controlled by punch cards that encoded the complex fabric patterns it was to weave, led the way for many subsequent calculating and computing machines.
But Jacquard was hardly the first to conceive of using machinery to enhance the human brain’s computing power.
People have built calculating and computing tools for thousands of years. Let’s take a look at a few of the non-electronic predecessors to today’s silicon circuits.
This page: Babylonian clay tablets
In fact, archeologists still debate the meaning of cave paintings such as those at Lascaux. But there’s less dispute about the meaning of Babylonian clay-tablet writing, which was clearly used to record stores of grain and of beer, circa 2500 BC. It might be a stretch to call these clay tablets “computers,” but their role in tabulating and storing data is clear. Think of them as the ancient world’s first data banks.
This image, from the University of Chicago, is an administrative record of the payout of at least 600 quarts of an as-yet unidentified commodity at five villages near Persepolis in about 500 B.C.
Photo: University of Chicago