England’s first commercial computer, the Lyons Electronic Office, solved clerical problems. The president of Lyons Tea Co. had the computer, modeled after the EDSAC, built to solve the problem of daily scheduling production and delivery of cakes to the Lyons tea shops. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons…
The National Bureau of Standards completed its SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles. Rather than testing components like its companion, the SEAC, the SWAC had an objective of computing using already-developed technology.
The beginning of image processing and the construction of the early National Bureau of Standards Electronic Automatic Computer (SEAC) computer made possible the experiments that led to image processing. SEAC was the first electronic computer with an internally stored program in the United States government. It was the first of…
The CSIRAC was Australia’s first digital computer and the fifth stored-program machine in the world. It’s first test was run in November, 1949 and it was built by a team of engineers and scientists led by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard. Input was done on punched paper tape instead of…
The Small Scale Experimental Machine, the Baby, was built in 1947 and 1948 to subject the Williams-Kilburn Tube to a searching test of its speed and reliability. It also demonstrated the feasibility and potential of a stored-program computer. It was quickly decided to press ahead to develop a realistic useable…
The BINAC was a bit serial binary computer designed by Eckert-Mauchly. It had a 512-word acoustic mercury delay line memory divided into 16 channels each holding 32 words of 31 bits with an additional 11-bit space between words to allow for circuit delays in switching. The clock rate was 4.25mh…
The University of Pennsylvania inaugurated the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) on Feb 16th 1946. It is an electronic computer many times more complex than any previous. Eckert and Mauchly formulated the plans for the machine in 1943, and it runs its first trials in Nov 1945. It’s structure…
Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed the MARK series of computers at Harvard University. The MARK series began with the Mark I in 1944. Imagine a giant roomful of noisy, clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and 8 feet high. The 5-ton device contained almost 760,000 separate pieces. It was…
Designed by Howard Aiken and IBM, the Harvard Mark I debuts to the public in a ceremony at Harvard University. It was powered by a five horsepower electric motor, weighed five tons, and measured two feet by fifty one feet. It was slower than other machines being developed at the…
Considered the first electromechanical computers, they were created by Konrad Zuse in 1938. He began construction of the Z1 in 1936, setting out to make a computing machine with faster, more extensive calculating power than the existing desk calculators. Deciding on a binary system for greater calculating speed, he set…