Hey everyone
Welcome to another Nexus post.
True to our goal of making tech more understandable, especially from a Pakistani lens, today we’re sharing one of our deepest dives yet.
We’re going all the way back - before smartphones, before laptops, before even electricity - to answer one big question:
Where did computers actually come from?
You probably use one every single day. But most of us never stop to ask how these machines went from room-sized monsters to the little black rectangles we now call “phones.”
Let’s get into it.
The computer you’re using right now didn’t just fall out of the sky. It’s the result of decades of failure, constant hard work, genius minds, and tons of curiosity. There’s a whole story behind it, a lore with which people are not familiar.
Why should you care?
Because computers quite literally run everything - from your phone to your bank account and even your fridge. Knowing how they came to be helps you understand where we’re heading next.
The invention of computers isn’t just a story of machines, rather, it’s a story of human ambition. We went from mechanical calculators to room-sized giants to chips smaller than your fingernail in less than a century.
And now? Computers have changed:
The way we work
The way we learn
The way we live
They have rewired the way we even think, so the least we could do is find out about how it all began, right?
And that is exactly what we will be doing in today’s piece - We’ll start at the birth of computing, move through the electronic age, explore the personal computer boom, and end in today’s world of smart tech.
Now, let’s rewind time and see how it all began.
The Birth of Computing (2300 BCE – 1840s)
Before silicon chips and 4K monitors, computation started with something far simpler, such as counting with stones, sticks, and eventually, the abacus. These early tools laid the foundation for what was about to become one of humanity’s most disruptive inventions.
Over time, our ambitions also started growing. From Blaise Pascal’s mechanical calculator in the 1600s to Charles Babbage’s visionary Analytical Engine in the 1800s, brilliant minds kept pushing the boundaries.
Similarly, we also had Ada Lovelace, who is often considered the world’s first programmer. She was the one who saw the potential of these machines before they even existed.
The interesting thing about all these people was that they weren’t just tinkerers, doing something for fun; they had a vision for setting the stage for what was to come.
Let’s break this down, one milestone at a time.
The Conceptual Roots: Mechanical Computing Devices
Abacus (2300 BCE and onward)
The word Abacus was derived from the Greek word “abax”, which means “tabular form”. The abacus was the first counting machine. Before that? It was fingers, stones, or various kinds of natural material. The abacus didn’t come from one place. Different versions of it, which looked a bit different from each other, appeared throughout the timeline in:
Abacus wasn’t something out of a cyberpunk world; it was a simple device that a person could operate just by sliding some beads, and this device was able to perform tasks such as Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
In a world without paper or electricity, the Abacus turned abstract math into a physical interaction. You could see numbers move in front of your eyes, and that was a revolutionary invention at the time.
Even today, the Abacus is used in multiple parts of Asia, particularly in Japan and China, to teach children the fundamentals of mathematics, which allows them to develop a mental arithmetic skill, other than it’s still useful up to this day for blind people, it helps them in teaching how to count.
Pascaline (1642)
Fast forward a couple of thousand years to 17th-century France, where a teenage Blaise Pascal designed and built Pascaline between 1642 and 1644. The machine was only able to perform simple arithmetic functions like addition and subtraction, with numbers being entered by manipulating its dials.
The reason Pascal invented the machine was to help his father in tax collection, so it was the first business machine too (if one does not count the abacus). And he didn’t stop after making 1 Pascaline, he built 50 of them over the next 10 years.