THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING

THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING

Caitlin Berka- Oates

1936-The Z1

Originally named the V1, the Z1 began development in 1936 by

Germany's Konrad Zuse in his parents living room and today is

considered the first electro-mechanical binary programmable computer.

The Z1 had 64-word memory (each word contained 22 bits) and a clock

speed of 1 Hz. To program the Z1 required that the user insert punch tape

into a punch tape reader and all output was also generated through

punch tape.

1942 ABC• The Atanasoff–Berry Computer was made in 1942 and was not

programmable. It was invented by John Vincent Atanasoff. The ABC pioneered important elements of modern computing, including binary arithmetic and electronic switching elements.

1944 Harvard Mark I ComputerThe ASCC was built from switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. It used 765,000 components and hundreds of miles of wire, comprising a volume of 51 feet (16 m) in length, eight feet (2.4 m) in height, and two feet (~61 cm) deep. It had a weight of about 10,000 pounds (4500 kg). The basic calculating units had to be synchronized mechanically, so they were run by a 50-foot (~15.5 m) shaft driven by a five-horsepower (4 kW) electric motor

1946 ENIAC 1 Computer Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It was Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems.ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. When ENIAC was announced in 1946 it was heralded in the press as a "Giant Brain". It had a speed of one thousand times that of electro-mechanical machines.

1951 UNIVAC ComputerThe UNIVAC I was the second commercial computer produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was begun by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand (which later became part of Sperry, now Unisys). In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply known as "the UNIVAC".

IBM 701 EDPM ComputerJump to: navigation, search IBM 701 operator's console IBM 701 processor frame Williams tube from an IBM 701 at the Computer History Museum The IBM 701, known as the Defense Calculator while in development, was announced to the public on April 29, 1952, and was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer.[1] Its business computer siblings were the IBM 702 and IBM 650.