(Descartes; 02-03; p.3)

Computing

Two hundred years on, natural sciences had been established; limits lay mainly in the relatively modest possibilities to gain (exact) measurements and to calculate and visualise relations with a large number of elements.

The latter had been tried to overcome by mechanising pre-defined steps of calculations since roughly the 1850s. ( A small and surely incomplete history of computing is found here.) To name are the Analytical Machine of the Briton Charles Babbage as well as the efforts and concepts of his compatriots Ada Lovelace and George Boole to programme such a machine.

Still one hundred years later, the Briton Alan Mathison Turing and the American-by-choice John von Neumann eventually developed concepts for machines that could solve any problem, provided that it would be translatable into a formula.

Not 25 years onward and American computer scientists and engineers constructed the first "computers", i.e. machines consisting of electronic Integrated Circuits - the original model of today's "chips" -, input-, screen- and output-devices.
Eventually, in the 1980s the "chip and data-processing revolution" gathered pace, i.e. it became possible to produce affordable chips en masse and programmes have been created since that put Turing's and his predecessor's concepts into practice. (read on here)