Development of Electro-Mechanical Machines

Mark 1

Howard Aiken designed the first general-purpose electro-mechanical computer in 1937. It was built as an automatic calculating machine that would combine established technology with the punch cards of Hollerith. Herman Hollerith, a statistician in the 1880s with the US Bureau of Census, he completed a set of machines to help process the results of the 1890 census. Hollerith later left the Census Bureau and established the Tabulating Machine Company which later became the International Business Machine Corporation or IBM.

This general-purpose electro-mechanical computer designed by Aiken was named Mark 1 with Automatic Controlled Calculator as its official name. The Mark 1 could perform the four basic operations and could locate information stored in a tabular form. It could even perform some complicated calculations.

Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC)

The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator or SSEC was installed at IBM New York office in 1947 and was used through 1952. It was a hundred times faster compare to the Mark 1.

Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)

It was in 1942 when Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff, a mathematics professor at Iowa State College and Clifford Berry developed ABC as a prototype of an electronic digital computer. This ABC possessed the characteristics and components of the modern day electronic computers.

Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC)

This was developed between 1943 and 1946 under the supervision of Presper Eckert Jr., and John Mauchly. The ENIAC was the very first large scale vacuum tube computer.

It only took two hours for ENIAC to solve a nuclear problem that would previously have required 100 years of calculation by a physicist. It happened on its test run in February of 1946; its speed of calculation was a thousand times faster than the best mechanical calculators then.

Universal Automatic Computer 1 (UNIVAC 1)

Presper Eckert Jr., and John Mauchly, in 1951 introduced the first commercial computer which happened to be the first computer which could handle alphanumeric information with equal facility. UNIVAC 1 was also the first computer to separate the input and the output elements from the actual computations making the entire process easier.

The appearance of UNIVAC 1 marked the beginning of computers belonging to the so called first generation. The major progress then was the use of vacuum tubes to replace relays as a means of storing data in memory and the use of stored program. The addition of memory made the punch card system and the calculators obsolete. The wire board was replaced by computer programs designed and written in a new and better language for processing.