When examining computer history, Charles Babbage is a good place to start because he is considered the father of the computer. He created it on paper but never actually finished building it because the gearing systems were too intricate to construct using the crude technology available.

When the British writer L. J. Comrie described the world's first practical automatic computer - the ASCC machine designed by Professor Howard Aiken of Harvard and constructed by IBM in 1944 - he titled his article, "Babbage's Dream Come True." For it was Charles Babbage who conceived, designed, and began building a calculating machine that could solve any mathematical problem given to it, automatically and without error.(3)

The development of punch cards started with the Jacquard's Loom. With the Jacquard Loom it was possible to store and "program" patterns into textiles by using as many as 20,000 cards. Babbage got the idea of punch cards to program math calculators from Jacquard. Punch cards would be used by the weaving industry, self-playing pianos, and eventually by computer programmers.

The following is an account about how self-playing pianos used punch cards to record music:

As the pianist played so the punches cut the master roll and made a permanent recording... This method of recording thus secured accuracy of replaying, the length of the perforation being determined by the duration that the recording pianist held down the particular keys. The punch in the machine repeated at the rate of 4,000 cycles per minute, so making possible the accurate recording of the most rapid staccato notes struck by the pianist. The resultant punched hole for the briefest note would be just 1/32 inch in diameter.(4)

In 1942, the U.S. Army Ordinance Corps commissioned a team of scientists to design a top-secret electronic machine that could compute trajectory tables quickly. This computer would be called the ENIAC. In 1946, the ENIAC computer was considered the largest and most complex electronic device ever built. It was also heralded as being the first all-electronic computer, even though Colossus beat it by three years. The British government kept Colossus an official state secret until 1974.

Today, it is no secret that computer use is growing and with it a demand in energy and the greenhouse gases and nuclear waste that comes with it. In Babbage's day technological problems had to be overcome to get the first mainframe computer built. Similarly, today's computers will have to overcome energy shortages due to battery capacities and environmental concerns. Solutions will include technological innovations and improved efficiencies. Any improvement will have to solve these problems plus the original problem, recording history and the ideas that come with it.