Which of the following inventions evolved into the modern computer?

Question

SLIDE RULER
THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE
THE JACQUARD LOOM
THE ABACUS

Answer 1

guessing the abacus

Answer 2

All of them. The slide rule and the 'difference engine' were analog computers, which were something of a dead-end in computing but showed what machines could and could not do. The Jacquard loom was a digitally-controlled device, as was the player piano. The abacus showed us how to store numbers in a simple form.

I'm afraid that the machines that lead far more directly to the modern computers are far more obscure than any of those mentioned, There were a lot of weird devices like IBM's automatic card punching devices that could read the numbers on a card and then do a certain amount of mathematics on these, then punch new cards that you could run through the machine once again, thus enabling you do do iterative procedures.

Probably the most direct predecessor of the modern computer was a room-ful of women, recruited from the mountains around US Army research facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee or Aberdeen, Maryland, each seated at a desk with a hand-operated adding machine. Each would follow a series of calculations based on the results of the woman next to her. The results produced numerical solutions to some very complex and otherwise-insoluble differerential equations necessary for war work.

Answer 3

The Abacus