Editing Information Age (section)

===Previous inventions===

Humans have manufactured tools for counting and calculating since ancient times, such as the [[abacus]], [[astrolabe]], [[equatorium]], and mechanical timekeeping devices. More complicated devices started appearing in the 1600s, including the [[slide rule]] and [[mechanical calculator]]s. By the early 1800s, the [[Industrial Revolution]] had produced mass-market calculators like the [[arithmometer]] and the enabling technology of the [[punch card]]. [[Charles Babbage]] proposed a mechanical general-purpose computer called the [[Analytical Engine]], but it was never successfully built, and was largely forgotten by the 20th century and unknown to most of the inventors of modern computers.

The [[Second Industrial Revolution]] in the last quarter of the 19th century developed useful electrical circuits and the [[telegraph]]. In the 1880s, [[Herman Hollerith]] developed electromechanical tabulating and calculating devices using punch cards and [[unit record equipment]], which became widespread in business and government.

Meanwhile, various [[analog computer]] systems used electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic systems to model problems and calculate answers. These included an 1872 [[tide-predicting machine]], [[differential analyser]]s, [[perpetual calendar]] machines, the [[Deltar]] for water management in the Netherlands, [[Network analyzer (AC power)|network analyzers]] for electrical systems, and various machines for aiming military guns and bombs. The construction of problem-specific analog computers continued in the late 1940s and beyond, with [[FERMIAC]] for neutron transport, [[Project Cyclone]] for various military applications, and the [[Phillips Machine]] for economic modeling.

Building on the complexity of the [[Z1 (computer)|Z1]] and [[Z2 (computer)|Z2]], German inventor [[Konrad Zuse]] used electromechanical systems to complete in 1941 the [[Z3 (computer)|Z3]], the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. Also during World War II, Allied engineers constructed electromechanical [[bombe]]s to break German [[Enigma machine]] encoding. The base-10 electromechanical [[Harvard Mark I]] was completed in 1944, and was to some degree improved with inspiration from Charles Babbage's designs.