Module 2 Living in The IT Era

UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City
College of Information Technology

First Semester, S.Y. 2020-2021
Course Code : GEEL 1

Course Title : LIVING IN THE IT ERA
PRELIM PERIODIC COVERAGE
MODULE No. 02
TITLE: 4 BASIC COMPUTING PERIODS
INTRODUCTION Information technology has been around for a long, long
time. Basically as long as people have been around,
information technology has been around because there
were always ways of communicating through technology
available at that point in time. There are 4 main ages
that divide up the history of information technology.
Only the latest age (electronic) and some of the
electromechanical age really affects us today, but it
is important to learn about how we got to the point we
are at with technology today.
LEARNING 1. Describe the insight about the 4 basic computing
OUTCOMES periods of computer.
2. Explain how machine changes the worlds into
digital and virtual reality.
3. Classify the different discoveries during pre-
mechanical, mechanical, electro-mechanical and
electronic age.
LEARNING 1. Name the different personages/inventors and their

OBJECTIVES contributions in the development of computer.
2. Identify the machine that were developed and made a
remarkable contribution in the development of the
modern computer;
3. Appreciate the major contributions of some experts
in the improvement of computer; and
4. Demonstrate the value of teamwork, patience and
sharing in doing the given activity.
Discussion/Situational analysis/Content Etc.:
Computing Periods
Four basic periods, each characterized by a principal technology used to

solve the input, processing, output and communication problems of the
time:
A. Premechanical
B. Mechanical
C. Electromechanical
D. Electronic
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Tuguegarao City

A. The Premechanical Age: 3000 B.C. - 1450 A.D.
1. Writing and Alphabets. The first humans communicated only through

speaking and picture drawings. In 3000 B.C., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia
(what is today southern Iraq) devised a writing system. The system, called
"cuniform" used signs corresponding to spoken sounds, instead of pictures,
to express words. From this first information system — writing — came
civilization as we know it today. The Phoenicians around 2000 B.C. further
simplified writing by creating symbols that expressed single syllables and
consonants (the first true alphabet). The Greeks later adopted the
Phoenician alphabet and added vowels; the Romans gave the letters Latin
names to create the alphabet we use today.
2. Paper and Pens. For the Sumerians, input technology consisted of a

penlike device called a stylus that could scratch marks in wet clay. About
2600 B.C., the Egyptians discovered that they could write on the papyrus
plant, using hollow reeds or rushes to hold the first "ink" - pulverized
carbon or ash mixed with lamp oil and gelatin from boiled donkey skin.
Other societies wrote on bark, leaves, or leather. The Chinese developed
techniques for making paper from rags, on which modern-day papermaking is
based, around 100 A.D.
3. Books and Libraries: Permanent Storage Devices. Religious leaders in

Mesopotamia kept the earliest "books" a collection of rectangular clay
tablets, inscribed with cuneiform and packaged in labeled containers — in
their personal "libraries." The Egyptians kept scrolls - sheets of papyrus
wrapped around a shaft of wood. Around 600 B.C., the Greeks began to fold
sheets of papyrus vertically into leaves and bind them together. The
dictionary and encyclopedia made their appearance about the same time. The
Greeks are also credited with developing the first truly public libraries
around 500 B.C.
4. The First Numbering Systems. The Egyptians struggled with a system that
depicted the numbers 1-9 as vertical lines, the number 10 as a U or
circle, the number 100 as a coiled rope, and the number 1,000 as a lotus
blossom. The first numbering systems similar to those in use today were
invented between 100 and 200 A.D. by Hindus in India who created a nine-
digit numbering system. Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was
developed. It was through the Arab traders that today's numbering system —
9 digits plus a 0 — made its way to Europe sometime in the 12th century.
5. The First Calculators. The existence of a counting tool called the

abacus, one of the very first information processors, permitted people to
"store" numbers temporarily and to perform calculations using beads strung
on wires. It continued to be an important tool throughout the Middle Ages.
B. The Mechanical Age: 1450 – 1840
1. The First Information Explosion. Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany,

invented the movable metal-type printing process in 1450 and sped up the
process of composing pages from weeks to a few minutes. The printing press
made written information much more accessible to the general public by
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reducing the time and cost that it took to reproduce written material. The
development of book indexes (alphabetically sorted lists of topics and
names) and the widespread use of page numbers also made information
retrieval a much easier task. These new techniques of organizing
information would become valuable later in the development of files and
databases.
2. Math by Machine. The first general purpose "computers" were actually

people who held the job title "computer: one who works with numbers."
Difficulties in human errors were slowing scientists and mathematicians in
their pursuit of greater knowledge.
3. Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.
a. Slide Rule. In the early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English

clergyman, invented the slide rule, a device that allowed the user to
multiply and divide by sliding two pieces of precisely machines and
scribed wood against each other. The slide rule is an early example
of an analog computer — an instrument that measures instead of
counts.
b. Pascaline. Blaise Pascal, later to become a famous French

mathematician, built one of the first mechanical computing machines
as a teenager, around 1642. It was called a Pascaline, and it used a
series of wheels and cogs to add and subtract numbers.
c. Leibniz's Machine. Gottfried von Leibniz, an important German

mathematician and philosopher (he independently invented calculus at
the same time as Newton) was able to improve on Pascal's machine in
the 1670s by adding additional components that made multiplication
and division easier.
4. Babbage's Engines
a. The Difference Engine. An eccentric English mathematician named

Charles Babbage, frustrated by mistakes, set his mind to creating a
machine that could both calculate numbers and print the results. In
the 1820s, he was able to produce a working model of his first
attempt, which he called the Difference Engine (the name was based on
a method of solving mathematical equations called the "method of
differences"). Made of toothed wheels and shafts turned by a hand
crank, the machine could do computations and create charts showing
the squares and cubes of numbers. He had plans for a more complex
Difference Engine but was never able to actually build it because of
difficulties in obtaining funds, but he did create and leave behind
detailed plans.
b. The Analytical Engine. Designed during the 1830s by Babbage, the

Analytical Engine had parts remarkably similar to modern-day
computers. For instance, the Analytical Engine was to have a part
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called the "store," which would hold the numbers that had been
inputted and the quantities that resulted after they had been
manipulated. It was also to have a part called the "mill" - an area
in which the numbers were actually manipulated. Babbage also planned
to use punch cards to direct the operations performed by the machine
— an idea he picked up from seeing the results that a French weaver
named Joseph Jacquard had achieved using punched cards to
automatically control the patterns that would be woven into cloth by
a loom.
c. Augusta Ada Byron. She helped Babbage design the instructions that
would be given to the machine on punch cards (for which she has been
called the "first programmer") and to describe, analyze, and
publicize his ideas. Babbage eventually was forced to abandon his
hopes of building the Analytical Engine, once again because of a
failure to find funding.
C. The Electromechanical Age: 1840 - 1940
The discovery of ways to harness electricity was the key advance made
during this period. Knowledge and information could now be converted into
electrical impulses.
1. The Beginnings of Telecommunication. Technologies that form the basis

for modern-day telecommunication systems include:
a. Voltaic Battery. The discovery of a reliable method of creating and

storing electricity (with a voltaic battery) at the end of the 18th
century made possible a whole new method of communicating
information.
b. Telegraph. The telegraph, the first major invention to use
electricity for communication purposes, made it possible to transmit
information over great distances with great speed.
c. Morse Code. The usefulness of the telegraph was further enhanced by
the development of Morse Code in 1835 by Samuel Morse, an American
from Poughkeepsie, New York. Morse devised a system that broke down
information (in this case, the alphabet) into bits (dots and dashes)
that could then be transformed into electrical impulses and
transmitted over a wire (just as today's digital technologies break
down information into zeros and ones).
d. Telephone and Radio. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in
1876. This was followed by the discovery that electrical waves travel
through space and can produce an effect far from the point at which
they originated. These two events led to the invention of the radio
by Marconi in 1894.
2. Electromechanical Computing
a. Herman Hollerith and IBM. By 1890, Herman Hollerith, a young man with
a degree in mining engineering who worked in the Census Office in
Washington, D.C., had perfected a machine that could automatically
sort census cards into a number of categories using electrical
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sensing devices to "read" the punched holes in each card and thus
count the millions of census cards and categorize the population into
relevant groups. The company that he founded to manufacture and sell
it eventually developed into the International Business Machines
Corporation (IBM).
b. Mark 1. Howard Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, decided

to try to combine Hollerith's punched card technology with Babbage's
dreams of a general-purpose, "programmable" computing machine. With
funding from IBM, he built a machine known as the Mark I, which used
paper tape to supply instructions(programs) to the machine tor
manipulating data (input on paper punch cards), counters to store
numbers, and electromechanical relays to help register results.
D. The Electronic Age: 1940 - Present
1. First Tries. In the early 1940s, scientists around the world began to
realize that electronic vacuum tubes, like the type used to create early
radios, could be used to replace electromechanical parts.
2. Eckert and Mauchly.
a. The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes,

the ENIAC. John Mauchly, a physicist, and J. Prosper Eckert, an
electrical engineer, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at
the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the U.S. Army, developed
the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) in 1946. It
could add, subtract, multiply and divide in milliseconds and
calculate the trajectory of an artillery round in about 20 seconds.
b. The First Stored-Program Computer. A problem with the ENIAC was that
the machine had no means of storing program instructions in its
memory - to change the instructions, the machine would literally have
to be rewired. Mauchly and Eckert began to design the EDVAC - the
Electronic Discreet Variable Computer -to address this problem. John
von Neumann joined the team as a consultant and produced an
influential report in June 1945 synthesizing and expanding on Eckert
and Mauchly's ideas, which resulted in von Neumann being credited as
the originator of the stored program concept. Maurice Wilkes, a
British scientist at Cambridge University, completed the EDSAC
(Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) two years before
EDVAC was finished, thereby taking the claim of the first stored-
program computer.
c. The First General-Purpose Computer for Commercial Use. Eckert and

Mauchly began the development of a computer called UNIVAC (Universal
Automatic Computer), which they hoped would be the world's first
general-purpose computer for commercial use, but they ran out of
money and sold their company to Remington Rand. A machine called LEO
(Lyons Electronic Office) went into action a few months before UNIVAC
and became the world's first commercial computer.
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3. The Generations of Digital Computing. Information technology has

traditionally been broken down into four or five distinct stages or
computer generations, each marked by the technology used to create the
main logic element (the electronic component used to store and process
information) used in computers during the period.
References:
 Kenneth C. Laudon, Carol Guercio Traver, Jane P. Laudon, Information

Technology and Systems.
 http://informationtechnoluogy.blogspot.com/#:~:text=Four%20basic
%20periods%2C%20each%20characterized,Electromechanical%2C%20and
Prepared by:
IT Instructors
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UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY

College of Information Technology

Course Code : GEEL 1

PRELIM PERIODIC COVERAGE

LEARNING 1. Name the different personages/inventors and their

Discussion/Situational analysis/Content Etc.:

Four basic periods, each characterized by a principal technology used to

College of Information Technology

A. The Premechanical Age: 3000 B.C. - 1450 A.D.

1. Writing and Alphabets. The first humans communicated only through

2. Paper and Pens. For the Sumerians, input technology consisted of a

3. Books and Libraries: Permanent Storage Devices. Religious leaders in

5. The First Calculators. The existence of a counting tool called the

B. The Mechanical Age: 1450 – 1840

1. The First Information Explosion. Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany,

College of Information Technology

2. Math by Machine. The first general purpose "computers" were actually

3. Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.

a. Slide Rule. In the early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English

b. Pascaline. Blaise Pascal, later to become a famous French

c. Leibniz's Machine. Gottfried von Leibniz, an important German

a. The Difference Engine. An eccentric English mathematician named

b. The Analytical Engine. Designed during the 1830s by Babbage, the

College of Information Technology

C. The Electromechanical Age: 1840 - 1940

1. The Beginnings of Telecommunication. Technologies that form the basis

a. Voltaic Battery. The discovery of a reliable method of creating and

College of Information Technology

b. Mark 1. Howard Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, decided

D. The Electronic Age: 1940 - Present

2. Eckert and Mauchly.

a. The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes,

c. The First General-Purpose Computer for Commercial Use. Eckert and

College of Information Technology

3. The Generations of Digital Computing. Information technology has

 Kenneth C. Laudon, Carol Guercio Traver, Jane P. Laudon, Information

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