First-Generation Computers

As moving parts inside computers were replaced by electrical circuits, computers worked faster and more efficiently. The first all-digital computer was completed in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of two engineers, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The computer, called the ENIAC,was even bigger than the Mark I. It weighed over 30 tons! It conducted electricity through vacuum tubes. In fact, the computer used over 18,000 vacuum tubes! Vacuum tubes get hot, and 18,000 of them created a lot of heat. So, it was necessary for the ENIAC to have special air conditioning units to keep it cooled down.

The ENIAC was considered quite a "brain." It was 300 times faster than the Mark I. It worked a thousand times faster than a person using a desk calculator. It was given a problem that would have taken 100 engineers, working eight hours a day, an entire year to solve. The ENIAC solved the problem in two hours.

Soon after the ENIAC was built, John von Neumannhad the idea of storing a computer program in the computer's memory. Up until this time, only the numbers used in the program were stored in the memory. Von Neumann's idea enabled people to build computers that worked faster than the ENIAC. In fact, today's computers are based on von Neumann's idea of storing programs in the memory.

A few years later, in 1951, Eckert and Mauchly designed another computer called the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC was even larger than the ENIAC. Eckert and Mauchly sold the UNIVAC to the United States Census Bureau. Other models of the UNIVAC were built and sold, making the UNIVAC the first commercialcomputer.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20