“History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.”
—James A. Garfield
2: The Computer’s Past
Although it seemed to burst upon us suddenly, the jet airplane can trace its beginnings back through the fabric wings of the Wrights to the wax wings of Icarus and Daedalus, and the steam aerophile of Hero in ancient Greece. The same thing is true of the computer, the “thinking machine” we are just now becoming uncomfortably aware of. No brash upstart, it has a long and honorable history.
Naturalists tell us that man is not the only animal that counts. Birds, particularly, also have an idea of numbers. Birds, incidentally, use tools too. We seem to have done more with the discoveries than our feathered friends; at least no one has yet observed a robin with a slide rule or a snowy egret punching the controls of an electronic digital computer. However, the very notion of mere birds being tool and number users does give us an idea of the antiquity and lengthy heritage of the computer.
The computer was inevitable when man first began to make his own problems. When he lived as an animal, life was far simpler, and all he had to worry about was finding game and plants to eat, and keeping from being eaten or otherwise killed himself. But when he began to dabble in agriculture and the raising of flocks, when he began to think consciously and to reflect about things, man needed help.
First came the hand tools that made him more powerful, the spears and bows and arrows and clubs that killed game and enemies. Then came the tools to aid his waking brain. Some 25,000 years ago, man began to count. This was no mean achievement, the dim, foggy dawning of the concept of number, perhaps in the caves in Europe where the walls have been found marked with realistic drawings of bison. Some budding mathematical genius in a skin garment only slightly shaggier than his mop of hair stared blinking at the drawings of two animals and then dropped his gaze to his two hands. A crude, tentative connection jelled in his inchoate gray matter and he shook his head as if it hurt. It was enough to hurt, this discovery of “number,” and perhaps this particular pioneer never again put two and two together. But others did; if not that year, the next.
Armed with his grasp of numbers, man didn’t need to draw two mastodons, or sheep, or whatever. Two pebbles would do, or two leaves or two sticks. He could count his children on his fingers—we retain the expression “a handful” to this day, though often our children are another sort of handful. Of course, the caveman did not of a sudden do sums and multiplications. When he began to write, perhaps 5,000 years later, he had formed the concept of “one,” “two,” “several,” and “many.”
Besides counting his flock and his children, and the number of the enemy, man had need for counting in another way. There were the seasons of the year, and a farmer or breeder had to have a way of reckoning the approach of new life. His calendar may well have been the first mathematical device sophisticated enough to be called a computer.