The mechanical calculator

Around the end of the tenth century, the French monk Gerbert d'Aurillac brought back from Spain the drawings of a machine invented by the Moors that answered Yes or No to the questions it was asked (binary arithmetic).^[9] Again in the thirteenth century, the monks Albertus Magnus and Roger Baconbuilt talking androids without any further development (Albertus Magnus complained that he had wasted forty years of his life when Thomas Aquinas, terrified by his machine, destroyed it).^[10]

In 1642, the Renaissance saw the invention of the mechanical calculator,^[11] a device that could perform all four arithmetic operations without relying on human intelligence.^[12] The mechanical calculator was at the root of the development of computers in two separate ways ; initially, it is in trying to develop more powerful and more flexible calculators^[13] that the computer was first theorized by Charles Babbage^[14][15] and then developed,^[16] leading to the development of mainframe computers in the 1960s, but also the microprocessor, which started the personal computer revolution, and which is now at the heart of all computer systems regardless of size or purpose,^[17] was invented serendipitously by Intel^[18] during the development of an electronic calculator, a direct descendant to the mechanical calculator.^[19]