American inventor Herman Hollerith invented the Tabulating Machine as an efficient way to compile population census data. An operator punched data into a card, slipped the card into the machine, and then pulled the handle. Wherever there was a hole in the card, an associated dial on the machine increased.…

While working on the Difference Engine, Babbage had a better idea for a machine that could calculate anything – not just numbers for mathematical tables. The Analytical Engine was composed of a store (equivalent to memory in a modern computer) and a mill (like a CPU in a  modern computer).…

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In Lyon, France, textile worker Basile Bouchon created a method to store weaving patterns in a piece of tape. Where there was a hole in the tape, the needle on the loom stayed still. If there was no hole, the needle was pushed forward and the thread was lifted.…

English mathematician Charles Babbage was tired of typographical errors in his books of mathematical tables. These books had lists of pre-computed numbers, which were used in navigation, astronomy, and statistics. Babbage drew up the design for the Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator that could produce these tables automatically.…

A transposition cipher changes the position of the letters in a message using a specific rule, called a key. The recipient, who also knows the  key, reverses the process to get the original text. Writing a message backwards is a transposition cipher, although it is not a secure one, as it is relatively easy to break the code.…

Developed in 1956, the IBM RAMAC 350 was the first computer to have a magnetic disk drive similar to those used today. It weighed 1 tonne (1 ton) and had  50 disks that stored a total of 5 MB of data.…

Most people find binary numbers difficult to work with. The hexadecimal system is based on multiples of 16 and uses the digits 0 to 9 followed by the letters A to F. A 24-bit binary number defining a colour can be written as six hexadecimal digits, making life easier for
programmers.…

Braille, developed by French inventor Louis Braille (1809–1852), is a famous example of binary code. It allows blind people to read by converting text into a pattern of raised dots embossed on paper. Each character is represented by a group of six dots, which can have the binary values of “raised” or “not raised”.…

It is possible to create images using long lines of ASCII characters. Often called ASCII art, these images were popular in the early days of the internet, as computers lacked the processing power to show proper images.…