About Computer Science

The history of computer science predates the invention of the modern digital computer. Machines for calculating fixed numberical tasks have existed since antiquity, such as the abacus. Charles babbage designed a difference engine in victorian times, and around 1900 the IBM corporation sold punch-card machines for accountancy tasks. However all these machines were constrained to perform a single task, or at best, some subset of all possible tasks.
Prior to the 1920s, the term computer referred to a human clerk who performed calculations. Early researchers in what came to be called computer science, such as Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing, were interested in the question of computability: what things can be computed by a human clerk who simply follows a list of instructions with paper and pencil, for as long as necessary, and without ingenuity or insight? Part of the motivation for this work was the desire to develop computing machines that could automate the often tedious and error-prone work of a human computer. Their key insight was to construct universal computing systems capable (in theory) of performing all possible computable tasks, and thus generalising all previous dedicated-task machines into the single notion of the universal computer. The creation of concept of universal computer marked the birth of modern computer science.
During the 1940s, as newer and more powerful computing machines were developed, the term computer came to refer to the machines rather than their human predecessors. As it became clear that computers could be used for more than just mathematical calculations, the field of computer science broadened to study computation in general. Computer science began to be established as a distinct academic discipline in the 1960s, with the creation of the first computer science departments and degree programs.[4] Since practical computers became available, many applications of computing have become distinct areas of study in their own right.