History
Some history snippets:
1623: Wilhelm Schickard designed and constructed the first working mechanical calculator.
This book originated the term cell.
1673: Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated a digital mechanical calculator: the Stepped Reckoner.
Leibniz was also the first(?) person to document the binary number system.
1820: Thomas de Colmar launched the mechanical calculator industry by releasing the simplified arithmometor.
1822: Charles Babbage started the design of the first automatic mechanical calculator, the difference engine out of which developed the first programmable mechanical calculator, the analytical engine.
Adoption of the punched card system from the Jaquard loom.
1843: Ada Lovelace wrote an algorithm to compute the Bernoulli numbers.
1885: Herman Hollerith invented the tabulator which used punch cards to process statistical information.
His company would eventually become
IBM
1940's: In the era of the Atanasoff-Berry computer and the ENIAC, the term computer began to refer to these machines.