For most of automation history, machines performed actions that were physically built into their mechanisms.
Gears established relationships. Cams created sequences. Relays connected electrical logic. PLCs later allowed industrial behavior to be changed through programmable instructions.
Computers expanded that idea dramatically.
A computer could store information, perform calculations, evaluate logical conditions, execute long sequences of instructions, and change its behavior according to software.
For automation, this represented a profound transition. Machines were no longer limited to simply moving and reacting. They could increasingly process information before deciding what should happen next.
Automation Gains a New Resource: Information
Every earlier automated system depended on physical resources such as energy, motion, materials, water, steam, or electricity.
Computers introduced another resource that became just as important: information.
A machine could now receive data, store it, transform it, compare values, perform calculations, and produce an output based upon the result.
This allowed automation to become far more flexible.
Instead of building a separate physical mechanism for every possible decision, engineers could increasingly express those decisions as software.
Computing Before Electronics
The idea of using machines to process information is much older than the electronic computer.
The Antikythera Mechanism represented astronomical information through mechanical gearing. The Jacquard loom used punched cards to control patterns. Charles Babbage proposed mechanical calculating machines whose behavior could be influenced by instructions.
Herman Hollerith later used punched-card equipment to process information for the 1890 United States Census.
Each of these developments demonstrated that machines could manipulate information as well as physical materials.
Why It Matters
Modern automation depends on the connection between information and action. Sensors produce data. Computers interpret that data. Control systems use the result to change what physical equipment does.
British mathematician Charles Babbage designed two famous mechanical calculating systems: the Difference Engine and the more ambitious Analytical Engine.
The Analytical Engine was never completed in Babbage's lifetime, but its design included concepts resembling several features of later computers, including memory, calculation, conditional operations, and punched-card control.
Babbage's designs demonstrated an extraordinary idea: a machine might not simply perform one calculation. It could potentially perform many different operations depending on the instructions supplied to it.
Ada Lovelace and the Meaning of Programming
Ada Lovelace studied Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine and recognized that its significance extended beyond numerical calculation.
Her notes included a detailed method for using the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers and explored the broader idea that symbolic information might be manipulated according to programmed rules.
Her work has become important to the history of computing because it illustrates the conceptual separation between a machine and the instructions that direct it.
That separation is fundamental to modern automation.
Hardware + Instructions = Flexible Machine
A fixed mechanical machine performs the behavior built into its structure.
A programmable computer can use the same hardware to perform many different tasks depending upon the software loaded into it.
This flexibility eventually transformed nearly every area of automation.
From Mechanical Calculation to Electromechanical Computing
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, information-processing machines increasingly incorporated electrical and electromechanical technologies.
Relays could represent logical states. Punched cards could store data. Electric motors could move mechanical components. Automatic tabulators could sort and process large quantities of information.
These systems helped bridge the gap between mechanical computing and fully electronic machines.
War Accelerates Electronic Computing
The demands of the Second World War dramatically accelerated the development of computing.
Governments required faster methods for cryptanalysis, ballistic calculations, communications, scientific research, and other complex tasks.
Machines such as Britain's Colossus and the American ENIAC demonstrated the extraordinary potential of electronic computation.
Vacuum tubes allowed electronic circuits to switch far faster than mechanical or electromechanical systems.
For the first time, complex calculations could be performed at speeds that were impossible with traditional mechanical technology.
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was developed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania.
ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes and occupied a large physical space, yet it could perform numerical calculations at extraordinary speed for its era.
Programming the early machine involved configuring switches and cables, demonstrating that even electronic computing initially remained closely connected to physical reconfiguration.
Later stored-program architectures would make computers dramatically easier to reprogram.
The Stored-Program Revolution
One of the most important developments in computing was the stored-program concept.
Instead of treating instructions as something entirely separate from the machine's working memory, program instructions could be represented digitally and stored electronically.
This allowed programs to be changed far more easily and enabled computers to move toward the architecture familiar today.
A machine could load different software and perform entirely different functions without physically rebuilding its circuitry.
Instructions Become Data
Once instructions could be stored electronically, automation became dramatically more adaptable.
Programs could be copied, modified, tested, and reused.
The physical machine no longer completely defined what the system could do. Software increasingly defined its behavior.
The Transistor Makes Computing Smaller
Early electronic computers relied heavily on vacuum tubes, which consumed substantial power, generated heat, and occupied considerable space.
The development of the transistor changed computing dramatically.
Transistors could perform switching and amplification functions while being smaller, more efficient, and more reliable than vacuum-tube technology.
As semiconductor technology advanced, computers became smaller, faster, less expensive, and increasingly practical for industrial applications.
Integrated Circuits Put More Computing Into Less Space
The integrated circuit allowed multiple electronic components to be fabricated together on semiconductor material.
This dramatically increased the number of electronic functions that could fit within a small physical area.
Increasing component density eventually led to microprocessors—general-purpose processors contained on integrated circuits.
Computing power that once required rooms of equipment could eventually fit inside industrial machines, vehicles, appliances, robots, and handheld devices.
The Microprocessor Brings Computers to Machines
The microprocessor was especially important to automation because computing could now be embedded directly into physical products and equipment.
Instead of requiring a large central computer, smaller processors could control individual systems.
Machine tools, instrumentation, robots, vehicles, process equipment, and industrial controllers could increasingly contain their own digital intelligence.
Automation was moving from centralized computing toward distributed computing.
Computers Enter the Factory
Computers gradually became important at multiple levels of industrial production.
At higher levels, they could support planning, scheduling, inventory management, engineering, quality analysis, and production reporting.
Closer to the machinery, computers could support numerical control, process monitoring, data acquisition, supervisory control, and machine coordination.
PLCs remained important for rugged real-time industrial control, while computers provided increasingly powerful information processing and visualization.
The factory was becoming both mechanical and digital.
Numerical Control: Computers Direct Machine Motion
Machine tools provided one of the clearest examples of digital information controlling physical work.
Numerical control allowed machine movement to be specified using coded instructions.
As computers became integrated into these systems, computer numerical control, or CNC, allowed machines to execute complex machining operations with high repeatability.
A digital program could determine where a tool moved, how quickly it traveled, and what sequence of operations occurred.
Software had become precision physical motion.
Computers Connect the Factory
As networking technology advanced, computers no longer had to operate as isolated machines.
Industrial computers, PLCs, operator interfaces, robots, drives, sensors, and enterprise systems could increasingly exchange information.
A machine's production count could be visible elsewhere in the plant. A fault could generate an alarm. Inventory systems could respond to production. Engineering data could move digitally between departments.
Information began flowing through factories much like materials flowed through production lines.
Automation Begins Producing Data
Digital automation introduced another important transformation: machines could generate enormous amounts of information about their own operation.
Cycle times, temperatures, pressures, motor currents, fault codes, production counts, quality measurements, and downtime events could be recorded.
This gave engineers and managers new ways to understand production.
Instead of relying entirely upon observation, industrial decisions could increasingly be based on data.
From Computers to Intelligent Automation
Modern automated systems are built on layers of computing.
PLCs execute machine logic. Robot controllers calculate motion. Industrial PCs run advanced applications. Servers store production data. Cloud systems connect facilities. Machine-vision computers analyze images.
Increasingly, artificial intelligence systems analyze patterns in data, recognize objects, predict equipment failures, optimize operations, and assist with decision-making.
None of this would be possible without the computing revolution that transformed information into something machines could process automatically.
Sense → Compute → Decide → Act
Earlier automated machines primarily reacted through mechanical relationships.
Computing added a powerful middle layer.
A sensor can measure the world. A computer can process that information. Software can determine the appropriate response. A machine can then act upon the decision.
This loop is now fundamental to robotics, autonomous systems, machine vision, smart manufacturing, and artificial intelligence.
The Machines That Taught Automation to Think
Computers did not make machines conscious, but they fundamentally changed what automated systems could accomplish.
Automation had already learned how to move, regulate, sequence, and respond.
Computers gave machines the ability to process information at extraordinary speed.
Instructions could be stored digitally. Calculations could be performed automatically. Data could be analyzed. Complex decisions could be expressed as software. Machines could communicate through networks.
This transformed the relationship between information and physical work.
A digital instruction could move a machine tool. A calculation could determine a robot's trajectory. A database could change a production schedule. A sensor reading could trigger an automatic response.
Automation had entered the information age.
The next step was to combine computing with increasingly flexible machines capable of interacting physically with the world: robotics.
References & Further Reading
Ceruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Campbell-Kelly, Martin, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey R. Yost. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014.
Rojas, Raúl, and Ulf Hashagen, eds. The First Computers: History and Architectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Swade, Doron. The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. London: Little, Brown, 2000.
Haigh, Thomas, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope. ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.