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ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had combinations of these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one package. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.
EDVAC was one of the earliest electronic computers. It was built by Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Pennsylvania. Along with ORDVAC, it was a successor to the ENIAC. Unlike ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was designed to be a stored-program computer.
BINAC was an early electronic computer designed for Northrop Aircraft Company by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC) in 1949. Eckert and Mauchly, though they had started the design of EDVAC at the University of Pennsylvania, chose to leave and start EMCC, the first computer company. BINAC was their first product, the first stored-program computer in the United States; BINAC is also sometimes claimed to be the world's first commercial digital computer even though it was limited in scope and never fully functional after delivery.
The UNIVAC I was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was started by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand. In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply known as "the UNIVAC".
The IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data-Processing Machine is an early digital computer produced by IBM in the mid-1950s. It was the first mass produced computer in the world. Almost 2,000 systems were produced, the last in 1962, and it was the first computer to make a meaningful profit. The first one was installed in late 1954 and it was the most-popular computer of the 1950s.
BARK was an early electromechanical computer. BARK was built using standard telephone relays, implementing a 32-bit binary machine. It could perform addition in 150 ms and multiplication in 250 ms. It had a memory with 50 registers and 100 constants. It was later expanded to double the memory. Howard Aiken stated in reference to BARK "This is the first computer I have seen outside Harvard that actually works."
The ERA 1101, later renamed UNIVAC 1101, was a computer system designed and built by Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in the early 1950s and continued to be sold by the Remington Rand corporation after that company later purchased ERA. Its (initial) military model, the ERA Atlas, was the first stored-program computer that was moved from its site of manufacture and successfully installed at a distant site. Remington Rand used the 1101's architecture as the basis for a series of machines into the 1960s.
The IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, known as the Defense Calculator while in development, was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer and its first series production mainframe computer, which was announced to the public on May 21, 1952. It was invented and developed by Jerrier Haddad and Nathaniel Rochester based on the IAS machine at Princeton.
The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. It is sometimes called the von Neumann machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a mathematics professor at both Princeton University and IAS. The computer was built from late 1945 until 1951 under his direction. The general organization is called von Neumann architecture, even though it was both conceived and implemented by others. The computer is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History but is not currently on display.
The IBM 700/7000 series is a series of large-scale (mainframe) computer systems that were made by IBM through the 1950s and early 1960s. The series includes several different, incompatible processor architectures. The 700s use vacuum-tube logic and were made obsolete by the introduction of the transistorized 7000s. The 7000s, in turn, were eventually replaced with System/360, which was announced in 1964. However the 360/65, the first 360 powerful enough to replace 7000s, did not become available until November 1965. Early problems with OS/360 and the high cost of converting software kept many 7000s in service for years afterward.
The Remington Rand 409, a punched card calculator which was programmed with a plugboard, was designed in 1949. It was sold in two models: the UNIVAC 60 (1952) and the UNIVAC 120 (1953). The model number referred to the number of decimal digits it could read from each punched card.
Derrick Henry "Dick" Lehmer, almost always cited as D.H. Lehmer, was an American mathematician significant to the development of computational number theory. Lehmer refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas–Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. His peripatetic career as a number theorist, with him and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.
The Z4 was arguably the world's first commercial digital computer. It was designed, and manufactured by early computer scientist Konrad Zuse's company Zuse Apparatebau, for an order placed by Henschel & Son, in 1942; though only partially assembled in Berlin, then completed in Göttingen, and not delivered by the defeat of Nazi Germany, in 1945. The Z4 was Zuse's final target for the Z3 design. Like the earlier Z2, it comprised a combination of mechanical memory and electromechanical logic, so was not a true electronic computer.
SEAC was a first-generation electronic computer, built in 1950 by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and was initially called the National Bureau of Standards Interim Computer, because it was a small-scale computer designed to be built quickly and put into operation while the NBS waited for more powerful computers to be completed. The team that developed SEAC was organized by Samuel N. Alexander. SEAC was demonstrated in April 1950 and was dedicated in June 1950; it is claimed to be the first fully operational stored-program electronic computer in the US.
The SWAC was an early electronic digital computer built in 1950 by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Los Angeles, California. It was designed by Harry Huskey.
The Harvard Mark III, also known as ADEC was an early computer that was partially electronic and partially electromechanical. It was built at Harvard University under the supervision of Howard Aiken for the U.S. Navy.
Leland Erskin Cunningham was an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. In a career spanning 50 years, he became an authority on orbit theory and on precise measurements of the orbits of comets, planets, satellites, and space probes. He was also an early authority on electronic digital computers and assisted in their construction and use in orbit calculations.
The IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) was a one-of-a-kind first-generation computer built by IBM for the United States Navy's Bureau of Ordnance. It went into service in December 1954 and was likely the most powerful computer at the time. The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC), was built at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory under the direction of Wallace Eckert.
The Datatron is a family of decimal vacuum tube computers developed by ElectroData Corporation and first shipped in 1954. The Datatron was later marketed by Burroughs Corporation after Burroughs acquired ElectroData in 1956. The Burroughs models of this machine were still in use into the 1960s.
Albert Smiley Hoagland had a long career on the development of hard disk drives (HDD) starting with the IBM RAMAC. From 1956 to 1984, he was with IBM in San Jose, California and then from 1984 to 2005 he was the director of the Institute for Information Storage Technology at Santa Clara University. He wrote the first book on Digital Magnetic Recording. Hoagland played a central role in the preservation and restoration of the IBM RAMAC now displayed at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. He died in Portland, Oregon, on 1st October 2022.
References
- ↑ Weik, Martin H. (June 1957). "CALDIC". ed-thelen.org. A Second Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems.
- ↑ Research, United States Office of Naval (1953). A survey of automatic digital computers. Office of Naval Research, Dept. of the Navy. p. 17.
- Morton, Paul L. (1951). "The California Digital Computer". Mathematics of Computation. 5 (34): 57–61. doi: 10.1090/S0025-5718-51-99438-0 . ISSN 0025-5718.
