Diode Logic
Diode Logic makes use of the fact that the electronic device known as a diode will conduct an electrical current in one direction, but not in the other. In this manner, the diode acts as an electronic switch.
SEAC
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…
CSIRAC
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…
Thomas Watson, Jr.
Williams Tube
Manchester Baby Machine
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…
Norbert Wiener
A bureaucracy and a factory are automated machines in Wiener’s view. The whole world — even the universe — could be seen as one big feedback system subject to the relentless advance of entropy, which subverts the exchange of messages that is essential to continued existence (Wiener, 1954). This concept…
The Bit
Claude Shannon
Shannon was a graduate of the University of Michigan, being awarded a degree in mathematics and electrical engineering in 1936. He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he obtained a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1940. Shannon wrote a Master’s thesis…