China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
The emergence of information technology: A state of practice report
Published in F.B.J. Barends, J. Lindenberg, H.J. Luger, L. de Quelerij, A. Verruijt, Geotechnical Engineering for Transportation Infrastructure, 2017
The transistor circuits inside modem electronic digital computers perform such logic operations. A significant step in the development of analogue computers was the American engineer Bush’s invention of a device for amplifying the small torque generated by a rotating wheel. In 1930 Bush and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology constructed a mechanical analogue computer, called the differential analyser, for solving differential equations.
Water resource prospects for the next 50 years on the water planet: personal perspectives on a shared history from Earth Day, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and One Health to the futures of alternative energy, bioconvergence and quantum computing
Published in Water International, 2021
From counting on our fingers to tallying other things with sticks and stones, we developed the abacus and subsequent aids to calculate sums of money as well as astronomical and navigational positions, constituting early technologies that influenced and were influenced by aspects of water resource management, among other things. From the ensuing development of the first analogue computers, including the recently modelled ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism and the astrolabe from over two millennia ago, to the slide rule in the early 1600s and Thomson’s tide-predicting machine of 1872, the technological development of more sophisticated mechanical analogue computers such as the differential analyser had come to fruition in the early 1900s (Cajori, 1908; Freeth et al., 2021; Hartree, 1940; North, 1974; Thomson, 1881). With the Second World War came the development of electromechanical analogue computers followed in short order by the first digital computers; transistors and integrated circuits followed with the mid-century postulation that machines might someday demonstrate intelligence, and by the early 1970s it became possible for 10,000 transistors to be integrated on a single computer chip (Turing, 1950; Hittinger, 1973).