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'Wilhelm Schickard' (April 22 1592 – October 23 1635) was a German polymath who built the first computer in 1623.
Schickard was born in Herrenberg. Contemporaries called his machine the ''Speeding Clock.'' It precedes the less versatile ''Pascaline'' of Blaise Pascal and the calculator of Gottfried Leibniz by twenty years. Schickard's letters to Johannes Kepler show how to use the machine for calculating astronomical tables. The machine could add and subtract six-digit numbers, and indicated an overflow of this capacity by ringing a bell; to aid more complex calculations, a set of Napier's bones were mounted on it. The designs were lost until the 19th century; a working replica was finally constructed in 1960.
Schickard's machine, however, was not programmable. The first ''design'' of a programmable computer came roughly 200 years later (Charles Babbage). And the first ''working'' program-controlled machine was completed more than 300 years later (Konrad Zuse's Z3, 1941).
Wilhelm Schickard died in Tübingen, in 1635.

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Trivia

External links

Trivia

★ The Schickard crater on the moon is named after Schickard.

★ Schickard wrote science fiction stories.

External links

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★ Wilhelm Schickard, father of the computer age by Juergen Schmidhuber

★ Computer history speedup since 1623

★ Schickard moon crater