As a result of a trip to the U.S.A. in June 1946, Dr F.C. (Freddie) Williams started active investigation at TRE into the storage of both analog and digital information on a Cathode Ray Tube. Storage of analog information could help solve the problem of static objects cluttering the dynamic…
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…
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…
A bit (abbreviated b) is the most basic information unit used in computing and information theory. A single bit (short for binary digit) is a zero or a one, or a true or a false, or for that matter any two mutually exclusive states. Claude E. Shannon first used the…
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…
John Mauchly grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In 1927 he got a scholarship to the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied engineering but soon switched to physics, earning his first degree. In 1932 he earned a doctorate and taught physics at various colleges. Mauchly, who had been a physics…
J Presper Eckert Jr. attended the William Penn Carter School in Germanstown. In 1937, after graduating from school, he entered the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania from where he graduated in 1941. After graduation he was offered a teaching job at Moore, where he met…
Eckert-Mauchly Corporation was formed by the scientists John Eckert and John Mauchly in the early 40s, designing and building some of the first famous computers in existence. The company was incorporated December 22nd, 1947, originally called Electronic Control Corp. before being renamed. Although the two men built the ENIAC before…
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…
Back in 1904, British scientist John Ambrose Fleming first showed his device to convert an alternating current signal into direct current. The “Fleming diode” was based on an effect that Thomas Edison had first discovered in 1880, and had not put to useful work at the time. This diode essentially…