Introduction

In the history of computing, mechanical devices were invented before electronic devices. In 1642 in France, Blaise Pascal invented a gear-driven machine named “Pascalene”; it was the first calculator to perform arithmetic [Comp96]. In 1833, the Englishman Charles Babbage created the Analytical engine, which was used to calculate and print mathematical tables. In fact, Babbage conceived the idea of a stored-program computer in which all the numbers and instructions were entered before a computation could begin. In 1889, the Electric Tabulating Machine was invented by Herman Hollerith in the United States; it was the very first data-processing machine, and it was used to tabulate the 1890 census.