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Early Computing From Pre - 1950s

Pre - 1950

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Reden Tomé
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6 views

Early Computing From Pre - 1950s

Pre - 1950

Uploaded by

Reden Tomé
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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In an 1886 letter, Charles Sanders Peirce described how logical operations could

be carried out by electrical switching circuits. During 1880-81 he showed


that NOR gates alone (or NAND gates alone) can be used to reproduce the
functions of all the other logic gates, but this work on it was unpublished until
1933. The first published proof was by Henry M. Sheffer in 1913, so the NAND
logical operation is sometimes called Sheffer stroke; the Logical NOR sometimes
called Peirce's arrow. Consequently, these gates are sometimes called universal
logic gates.

Eventually, vacuum tubes replaced relays for logic operations. Lee De Forest’s
modification, in 1907, of the Fleming valve can be used as a logic gate. Ludwig
Wittgenstein introduced a version of the 16-row truth table as proposition 5.101
of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Walther Bothe, inventor of the
coincidence circuit, got part of the 1954 Nobel Prize in physics, for the first
modern electronic AND gate in 1924. Konrad Zuse designed and built
electromechanical logic gates for his computer Z1 (from 1935 to 1938).

The first recorded idea of using digital electronics for computing was the 1931
paper “The Use of Thyratrons for High Speed Automatic Counting of Physical
Phenomena” by C. E. Wynn-Williams.[29] From 1934 to 1936, NEC engineer
Akira Nakashima, Claude Shannon, and Victor Shestakov published papers
introducing switching circuit theory, using digital electronics for Boolean
algebraic operations.

In 1936 Alan Turing published his seminal paper On Computable Numbers, with an
Application to the Entscheidungsproblem in which he modeled computation in
terms of a one-dimensional storage tape, leading to the idea of the Universal
Turing machine and Turing-complete systems.

The first digital electronic computer was developed in the period April 1936 – June
1939, in the IBM Patent Department, Endicott, New York by Arthur Halsey
Dickinson. In this computer IBM introduced, a calculating device with a keyboard,
processor and electronic output (display). The competitor to IBM was the digital
electronic computer NCR3566, developed in NCR, Dayton, Ohio by Joseph Desch
and Robert Mumma in the period April 1939 – August 1939. The IBM and NCR
machines were decimal, executing addition and subtraction in binary position
code.

In December 1939 John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry completed their experimental
model to prove the concept of the Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC) which began
development in 1937. This experimental model is binary, executed addition and
subtraction in octal binary code and is the first binary digital electronic computing
device. The Atanasoff–Berry computer was intended to solve systems of linear
equations, though it was not programmable. The computer was never truly
completed due to Atanasoff’s departure from Iowa State University in 1942 to work
for the United States Navy. Many people credit ABC with many of the ideas used in
later developments during the age of early electronic computing.

The Z3 computer, built by German inventor Konrad Zuse in 1941, was the first
programmable, fully automatic computing machine, but it was not electronic.

During World War II, ballistics computing was done by women, who were hired as
“computers.” The term computer remained one that referred to mostly women
(now seen as “operator”) until 1945, after which it took on the modern definition of
machinery it presently holds.

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was the first electronic
general-purpose computer, announced to the public in 1946. It was Turing-
complete, digital, and capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of
computing problems. Women implemented the programming for machines like
the ENIAC, and men created the hardware.

The Manchester Baby was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was
built at the Victoria University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn
and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.

William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs invented the first
working transistor, the point-contact transistor, in 1947, followed by the bipolar
junction transistor in 1948. At the University of Manchester in 1953, a team under
the leadership of Tom Kilburn designed and built the first transistorized computer,
called the Transistor Computer, a machine using the newly developed transistors
instead of valves. The first stored-program transistor computer was the ETL Mark
III, developed by Japan’s Electrotechnical Laboratory from 1954 to 1956. However,
early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to
manufacture on a mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of
specialized applications.

In 1954, 95% of computers in service were being used for engineering and
scientific purposes.

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