Before Everything, There Was a Problem
Welcome, cave dwellers!
Small warning before we start. This series will be a little different from what I usually write here.
I won’t be installing things, breaking things, or fighting my laptop’s BIOS. I’ll be telling you a story, slowly, the way you’d tell a friend about a movie you can’t stop thinking about. The movie, in this case, is the history of computing. The reason I want to tell it is that almost nobody tells it as a story, and that’s a shame, because the people in it are insane, in the best possible way.
How long this will take me, I have absolutely no idea. We’ll find out together.
Here’s the strange thing about computing. It wasn’t really invented. It was accumulated.
For twenty thousand years, small stubborn humans kept running into the same kind of problem: too many numbers, not enough time, too many mistakes. And every time, somebody figured out a piece of the solution. A way to write a number down. A board with beads. A bronze box of gears. A rule for dividing. A printed page. A card with holes in it.
None of them was building “a computer”. Each was fixing whatever was burning the floor under their feet. And each left a piece on the table that, decades or centuries later, someone else picked up and pushed a little further.
That’s the thread we’re going to follow.
Scroll the timeline at the top of this post. Every tile up there is one of those pieces.
The bone scratched somewhere in central Africa, where numbers leave a human head for the first time. The Sumerian scribes inventing positional numbers because the city of Uruk had too much grain to count. The bronze gear-box that sank in the Aegean and ran for who knows how long before it did. The Baghdad mathematician who gave us the word algorithm. The German goldsmith who taught Europe how to print. The French nineteen-year-old who built a brass calculator because his father was drowning in tax ledgers. The Lyon weaver whose punched cards finally split the instructions from the machine.
Each tile is a future bedtime story. Tap any of them and you’ll get the short version. We’ll get to the long ones one at a time.
The first one I’m actually going to sit down and write is about Charles Babbage, in 1830s London. Because that’s the moment all those scattered pieces finally land in the same head, and somebody (loud, grumpy, a little obsessed) tries to wire them together into a single thing.
See you in his study, little dwellers.
Back to your cave. This one’s mine. ;)
