Trailblazers in Electromechanical Computing [Historical]

Over the last six decades, electronic computing has been thoroughly integrated into the field of science and technology to become a fundamental tool for study, research, and design. Developing into vacuum tube, transistor, integrated circuit, and microprocessor technologies, electronics has boosted an amazing growth in computing power [1]. The commissioning in 2016 of the all-Chinese Sunway TaihuLight with a computing power of 93 PFLOPS (10¹⁵ floating point operations per second), two and a half times larger than the previous top world supercomputer, the Chinese Tianhe-2 of 2013 powered with Intel processors, suggests that the evolution is still far from saturation. It is intriguing to wonder what automatic computing was like before electronics enabled this boost in computing power. Indeed, the search for mechanical tools aimed at relieving the burden of computing reaches far back in the past, at least to ancient times when the abacus was built. However, with electricity this possibility took a major leap forward.