Advancement of Computers Through Time
By: Kellan Theobald
There has been many computers in
the history of the United States but the first
computer filled a whole room but only had
4 GB of data. It was very expensive so many
people could not afford when computers
came out they were something only The
first substantial computer was the giant
ENIAC machine by John W. Mauchly and J.
Presper Eckert at the University of
Pennsylvania. ENIAC (Electrical Numerical
Integrator and Calculator) used a word of
10 decimal digits instead of binary ones like
previous automated calculators/computers.
ENIAC was also the first machine to use
more than 2,000 vacuum tubes, using
nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes. Storage of all
those vacuum tubes and the machinery
required to keep the cool took up over 167
square meters (1800 square feet) of floor
space. Nonetheless, it had punched-card
input and output and arithmetically had 1
multiplier, 1 divider-square rooter, and 20
adders employing decimal "ring counters,"
which served as adders and also as quickaccess (0.0002 seconds) read-write register
storage.
The executable instructions
composing a program were embodied in
the separate units of ENIAC, which were
plugged together to form a route through
the machine for the flow of computations.
These connections had to be redone for
each different problem, together with
presetting function tables and switches.
This "wire-your-own" instruction technique
was inconvenient, and only with some
license could ENIAC be considered
programmable; it was, however, efficient in
handling the particular programs for which
it had been designed. ENIAC is generally
acknowledged to be the first successful
high-speed electronic digital computer
(EDC) and was productively used from 1946
to 1955. A controversy developed in 1971,
however, over the patentability of ENIAC's
basic digital concepts, the claim being made
that another U.S. physicist, John V.
Atanasoff, had already used the same ideas
in a simpler vacuum-tube device he built in
the 1930s while at Iowa State College. In
1973, the court found in favor of the
company using Atanasoff claim and
Atanasoff received the acclaim he rightly
deserved.
Progression of Hardware
In the 1950's two devices would be
invented that would improve the computer
field and set in motion the beginning of the
computer revolution. The first of
these two devices was the
transistor. Invented in 1947 by
William Shockley, John Bardeen,
and Walter Brattain of Bell Labs,
the transistor was fated to oust
the days of vacuum tubes in
computers, radios, and other
electronics.