A brief history of computers
Boole didn’t introduce propositional logic; what he did was come up with an <i>algebra</i> that encodes propositional logic.<p>Abstract algebra was a new snd developing thing back then, the idea that you can generalize from numbers and addition and multiplication to other structures that have something like numbers and addition and multiplication.<p>Boole found that if you take the two-element set {0, 1} and choose saturating addition as the addition-like operation and normal multiplication as the multiplication-like operation, you get an algebra (specifically a ring) that is isomorphic to propositional logic with its AND and OR operations.<p>So the idea that the number 1 can represent true and the number 0 false was Boole’s insight and the foundation of modern digital circuits.