Pascaline

It was 19 year old Blaise Pascal, in 1642, a French mathematician who devised the first true calculating machine, reputedly to help his father who was a tax controller! Numbers were entered by dialing a series of numbered wheels, and a series of toothed wheels transferred the movements to a result dial. Printed on wheel had the numbers from 0 to 9. When the first wheel made a complete turn from 0 to 9, it automatically caused the second wheel to advance to the next number, and so on.

Pascaline could add and subtract easily by the movement of wheels. The numbers of calculating capability of Pascaline was 9 crores 99 lakhs 99
thousands 9 hundreds and 99 (9,99,99,999).

In the late 1960s, a new computer programming language was developed by Professor Niklaus Writh in Zurich, and it was named PASCAL in recognition of Pascal's contribution to computing.

More than 50 years passed before anyone invented a calculating machine more advanced than the Pascaline. During that time, scientists' need to do complicated calculations continued to grow. Instruments such as Abacus and Pascaline helped, but they were too limited in capacity. As a result, some experiments were never completed. Others did manage to complete only after months and years of tiring calculations.