16 SCIENCE NEWS | February 26, 2022
FEATURE
T
his article was written, edited and designed on
laptop computers. Such foldable, transportable
devices would have astounded computer scientists
just a few decades ago, and seemed like sheer magic
before that. The machines contain billions of tiny computing
elements, running millions of lines of software instructions,
collectively written by countless people across the globe. You
click or tap or type or speak, and the result seamlessly appears
on the screen.
Computers were once so large they filled rooms. Now they’re
everywhere and invisible, embedded in watches, car engines,
cameras, televisions and toys. They manage electrical grids,
analyze scientific data and predict the weather. The modern
world would be impossible without them.
Scientists aim to make computers faster and programs more
intelligent, while deploying technology in an ethical manner.
Their efforts build on more than a century of innovation.
In 1833, English mathematician Charles Babbage conceived
a programmable machine that presaged today’s computing
architecture, featuring a “store” for holding numbers, a “mill”
for operating on them, an instruction reader and a printer. This
Analytical Engine also had logical functions like branching (if
X, then Y). Babbage constructed only a piece of the machine,
but based on its description, his acquaintance Ada Lovelace
saw that the numbers it might manipulate could represent
anything, even music. “A new, a vast, and a powerful language
is developed for the future use of analysis,” she wrote. Lovelace
became an expert in the proposed machine’s operation and is
often called the first programmer.
In 1936, English mathematician Alan Turing introduced
the idea of a computer that could rewrite its own instruc-
tions, making it endlessly programmable. His mathematical
abstraction could, using a small vocabulary of operations,
mimic a machine of any complexity, earning it the name
“universal Turing machine.”
The first reliable electronic digital computer, Colossus,
was completed in 1943 to help England decipher wartime
codes. It used vacuum tubes — devices for controlling the
flow of electrons — instead of moving mechanical parts like the
Analytical Engine’s cogwheels. This made Colossus fast, but
engineers had to manually rewire it every time they wanted
to perform a new task.
Perhaps inspired by Turing ’s concept of a more easily
reprogrammable computer, the team that created the United
States’ first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, drafted a
new architecture for its successor, EDVAC. Mathematician
John von Neumann, who penned EDVAC’s design in 1945,
described a system that could store programs in its memory
alongside data and alter the programs, a setup now called the
von Neumann architecture. Nearly every computer today
follows that paradigm.
In 1947, researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories invented
the transistor, a piece of circuitry in which the application of
voltage (electrical pressure) or current controls the flow of
electrons between two points. It came to replace the slower
and less-efficient vacuum tubes.
In 1958 and 1959, researchers at Texas Instruments and
Fairchild Semiconductor independently invented integrated
To celebrate our 100th anniversary, we’re highlighting some of
the biggest advances in science over the last century.
To see more from the series, visit the Century of Science site
at http://www.sciencenews.org/century
How far can we push this life-changing technology?
By Matthew Hutson
