History of computer science: hardware driven to software driven

Computer science (abbreviated as CS) is the scientific and practical approach to computation and its applications. The history of computer science is the best example of innovation. Based on my knowledge, the history of CS can be divided into two stages, the hardware driven stage and the software driven stage.

In the first stage of computer science, the hardware played a central role in its development. Abacus is the first kind of computing machine which helped human to perform simple mathematical computation in an efficient way. However, the abacus can’t automatically work and the usage is very limited. With the introduction of the punched card system in 1843, the first programmable computer is built by mechanical techniques. Although the way to use it is still very clumsy, many people are attracted to find out many novel ways to use it in different fields. The basic idea of the program is developed in that time. With the innovation in electronic industry, the punched card systems were quickly replaced by electronic circuits in the 1940s. The modern computer with Von Neumann architecture provided a powerful computing platform, which can’t only perform all kinds of computations but also can store inputs and results in memory. 

The second stage of computer science is driven by software. After the invention of the modern computer, the structure is kept unchanged for many years, which provided a very stable platform for the development of software. More and more applications are found out based on this platform and implemented as software in various programming languages. And requests from applications also drove the progress of hardware for faster computing speed and bigger memory size. The most recent progress as cloud computing has finally emancipated software from limitation of hardware. Hardware such as the central computing unit (CPU) and memory is abstracted to be computing resource and storage resource. Therefore, complex software can be run almost anywhere, even on a glass with a very tiny client-side computing unit, since most heavy-duty computing is performed in cloud side. This really brings computer science a brand new era with foreseeable big progress.