History of Computers

History of Computers

Table of Contents

Table of Contents………………….…….2

Abstract…………………………….……3

Body of Research…………………….4 - 6

Conclusion…………………………….…7

Bibliography……………………………..8

Abstract

This project explains the history of computers, starting from Howard Aiken’s Harvard Mark I to present day time. Although I have not gone over all of the models in my report, I have chosen those which I feel have had the greatest effect on the computer world. I will show how in just forty years, computers have come from complex, slow, room-sized machines, to the small and fast computers of today. These powerful machines are the art of many great men and women, which I will also briefly explain in the project. This project is to show others how these machines, that run many aspects of our life, have come from.

Body of Research

Computers are one of man-kinds largest achievements. In just forty years, computers have come from room-sized machines, that compute slowly and store little data, to machines that fit in your pocket, that store great amounts of data and process very quickly.

The computer that is credited with making the first complete digital operation is Howard Aiken’s Harvard Mark I (created in 1937), which was made up of 78 adding machines and calculators.

Although Howard’s model was automatic, it was controlled by instructions punched into a roll of paper tape. There was a need for an all-electronic machine.

This project was taken up by Dr. J. Presper Eckert Jr., and Dr. John W. Mauchly, with help from a few of their colleagues, in the spring of 1946. For two and a half years, they work diligently to construct a machine called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, or ENIAC. This machine was a complex of 500,000 connections that linked over 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tons, and occupied a room the size of an average three-bedroom home. ENIAC was capable of performing 5,000 additions in one second.

At around the time ENIAC was being created, a man by the name of John Atanasoff was hung up on a problem: How do you get machines to remember stuff you’ve already done? In 1939 Atanstoff and a graduate student, Clifford Berry started on the project of making an electrical computer. In 1942, when completed, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), had input and output, it stored data that could be modified, and it had a memory. In 1973 a historic decision was made by the U.S. District Court, it declared the ABC was the first computing device that was all electric and utilized the binary numbering system, regenerative memory, and digital arithmetic circuitry. These features are still found in modern day computers.

In 1951 a machine called the Electronic Discrete Variable Computer, or EDVAC, entered the computer world. This machine was the creation of Von Neumann, Eckert, and Author Burks. EDVAC consisted of 3,500 tubes. The unique feature of EDVAC, was that it was the pioneer for the “stored program concept,” which means, that instead of storing the program on paper tape with small holes punched in it, the entire program was stored and run off the computer.

Von Neumann then