CMSC 150 - Fall 2017 - The Pioneers of Computer Science

Description of Topic In the mid 1900s, a lot of the basic computing technology that we are familiar with today had already been developed at its most basic form. Computers existed and their abilities expanded human computational power, but there still was no way to bring this computing power to the general public or a way for computer scientists to easily work collaboratively. Then came Leonard Kleinrock, who, along with fellow computer scientists Donald Davies and Paul Baran, came up with packet switched networks, the foundation for what we now know as the Internet.  Kleinrock's life is a true story of perseverance and the American dream, as he was born to a poor family of Ukrainian immigrants. Not able to afford to go to college, Kleinrock lobbied for scholarships from every town government he could reach before finally getting the opportunity to take night classes at New York City College where he excelled so much that upon his graduation, he was able to get into MIT in o

Description of Topic In my first post, I proclaimed Charles Babbage "The Father of COMPUTING." However, holding this title does not also make Babbage the Father of the COMPUTER. Babbage was the first person to create a design for a machine that could engage in some form of computing, but this was not an actual computer, merely an ancestor of what we consider a computer to be today. The first man to complete a fully functional program controlled computer was a man named Konrad Zuse. While some consider Alan Turing to be the true father of the computer  ¹ , Zuse was the first one to actually create a programmable computer in 1938, so for this blog I will be considering him the Father of The Computer and not Turing.  Zuse's original computer, called the "Z1" was created over the span of two years from 1936 to 1938 in Zuse's parents living room. It was electro-mechanical, meaning that it was a mechanical device (like Babbage's difference engine) that

Description of Topic The name George Boole is not a household name by any means, and even to a lot of computer scientists and especially computer science students it probably does not ring much of a bell. But George Boole was one of the most important early pioneers to computer science because of his brilliant mind and his vast innovations in the fields of philosophy and mathematics. Growing up in Lincoln, England, Boole was a mathematical prodigy, surpassing his professors and becoming a teacher at the young age of 16.  ⁵  He made numerous achievements in the field of mathematics including developing Invariant Theory, which later inspired Albert Einstein.  ⁴  However, Boole was always fascinated by the relationship between mathematics and logic, and wanted to develop a way to link the two. He finally achieved this in 1847 when he published his essay Mathematical Analysis of Logic. In this essay, Boole described Boolean algebra, a new branch of mathematical logic in which there are

Description of Topic Born in December 1791 in London England, Charles Babbage was a brilliant mathematician, philosopher and engineer. Growing up in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it was clear that Babbage was a genius from an early age as "he found that his mathematics professors [at Cambridge] actually knew less than he did"  ⁴ .  A "renaissance man" of his time, Babbage crossed paths with many different famously brilliant english scholars in his lifetime, including Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin.  However, Babbage's most significant contribution to the scholarly world was his complex "difference machine," which is often cited as an early ancestor of the modern computer. Babbage's innovative creation allowed him to be labeled as "The Father of Computing"  ⁵  as he was the first man to create anything resembling a modern computer. Despite being recognized as an early computer, the machine was a calculator of sorts, accepting inpu