International Girls In ICT Day – April 25, 2024

History of International Girls In ICT Day

In 1822, Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath, invented the first mechanical computer. This computer, called the Difference Engine, was designed to perform basic computations and solve complex calculation problems. It had storage where data was temporarily held, and outputs were stamped into soft metal. Looking at the limitation of the Difference Engine – it could only perform one operation — Babbage decided to go a step further. In 1833, he devised the Analytical Engine. This automatic mechanical digital computer could perform all calculations and store up to 1000 50-digit numbers (more than any computer built before 1960). The machine consisted of four components: the mill, the store, the reader, and the printer. Inputs were to be entered using punched cards, and the machine will be steam-driven and operated by one attendant. However, the device was not built as he couldn’t obtain funding.

In 1843, Augusta Ada King, the countess of Lovelace, published a paper explaining the Analytical Engine and made a comparison between it and existing calculators. In 1843, she wrote the world’s first computer program by sequencing instructions on the punched cards that the Analytical Engine used. At the time, King was the only expert in the world in programming. In 1945, the University of Pennsylvania academics John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr. led a project to build the first electronic programmable computer in the United States. The computer called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was Turing-complete and could be programmed for many complex problems. The programming of the ENIAC was handled by six women, known as the “ENIAC girls.”

Between the mid-20th century and early 21st century, we experienced a significant leap in the development of the computer that dwarfed the innovations of the previous centuries. These advancements include the invention of the transistor, COBOL, FORTRAN, UNIX, floppy disk, and the Ethernet. During this same period, some of the biggest tech companies were established, including INTEL, I.B.M., Apple, and Microsoft. In the early 2000s, portable computers became commonplace due to the advancements in portable battery life and miniaturization of computing resources. This innovation also led to the development of cellular mobile phones in the early 2000s.