A brief history on computer science
Nowadays, the term “computer” and “laptop” is synonymous, but the field of computer science is not actually the study of “laptops”! Rather, it is the study of computation, algorithms, and information. In general, computer science is a widely applicable field. In fact, usually you can add “computational” to anything and it would be a legitimate field of study (i.e. Carnegie Mellon has a computational biology department, but graduate departments elsewhere often have computational physics, computational number theory, computational chemistry, etc). The underlying reason for this is that “mathematics” sets the foundation for the sciences and anything that uses mathematics has some degree of computation to it. Hence computer science is applicable to those fields. An amazing thing about that is that any contribution towards computer science indirectly contributes to countless other fields!
Human computers
While the term “computers” are mostly used in the context of laptops or personal computers, the actual word goes back several hundreds of years. Around the 1600’s, “computers” used to be a term given to people who did arithmetic computations.
Similarly, during World War I, the United States, would hire (with men in war) women to work as “computers”, calculating ballistic tables, producing map grids. Occupations such as “computers” were fundamental for the war effort.
Mechanical computers
At a similar time as the first human computers were becoming a profession, machines were being created to assist humans with these computations. The first such example was the abacus, and these machines were given the name “calculator”.
Fast forward a few centuries and in 1623, we have Wilhelm Schickard who made the first mechanical calculator.
As technology progressed, our ability to compute improved greatly. The average modern day computer can perform about 5 billion calculations PER SECOND!
The age of computers and information
With the introduction of personal computers, the notion of “computers” as humans doing actual calculations have been replaced with a small laptop that has several magnitudes of more computing power than us. However, we are still, more or less, interested in the same questions. How can we solve a problem? (algorithm design) How fast can we solve problems? What’s the quickest way to solve a problem? (algorithm / complexity analysis and optimization)
Overview
Computer science can be seen as the field of studying and modeling problem solving; it is the study of algorithms, information, and computations. With the age of powerful computers however, we are still curious about the same problems, but now the computational foundation for computer science aren’t humans crunching out numbers but rather “laptops” and “computers”.