History And Development Of Computer

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

with IBM, succeeded in producing an all-electronic calculator by 1944. The purpose of the computer was to create ballistic charts for the U.S. Navy [HYPERLINK: http://www.navy.mil/]. It was about half as long as a football field and contained about 500 miles of wiring. The Harvard-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or Mark I for short, was a electronic relay computer. It used electromagnetic signals to move mechanical parts. The machine was slow (taking 3-5 seconds per calculation) and inflexible (in that sequences of calculations could not change); but it could perform basic arithmetic as well as more complex equations.

Another computer development spurred by the war was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC [HYPERLINK: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/%7Ehistory/ENIAC.1.GIF]), produced by a partnership between the U.S. government and the University of Pennsylvania [HYPERLINK: http://www.upenn.edu:80/]. Consisting of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 5 ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

unit, which allowed all computer functions to be coordinated through a single source. In 1951, the UNIVAC I [HYPERLINK: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/services/unisys-folklore/] (Universal Automatic Computer), built by Remington Rand, became one of the first commercially available computers to take advantage of these advances. Both the U.S. Census Bureau [HYPERLINK: http://www.census.gov/] and General Electric [HYPERLINK: http://www.ge.com/] owned UNIVACs. One of UNIVAC's impressive early achievements was predicting the winner of the 1952 presidential election, Dwight D. Eisenhower [HYPERLINK: http://history.cc.ukans.edu/heritage/abilene/ikectr.html].

First generation computers were ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: