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A vacuum-tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry. While the history of mechanical aids to computation goes back centuries , if not millennia , the history of vacuum tube computers is confined to the middle of the 20th century.
ENIAC (/ ˈ ɛ n i æ k /; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) [1] [2] was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was the first to have them all.
In his manuscript "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", Claude Shannon (1916–2001) provided an outline for how binary logic could be implemented to program a computer. Subsequently, the first computer programmers used binary code to instruct computers to perform various tasks. Nevertheless, the process was very arduous.
The machine was fairly representative of first-generation valve-driven computer designs.It used mercury acoustic delay lines as its primary data storage, with a typical capacity of 768 20-bit words, supplemented by a parallel disk-type device with a total 4096-word capacity and an access time of 10 milliseconds.
The UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I) was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly , the inventors of the ENIAC .
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. [35] [36] [37] In this computer IBM introduced, a calculating device with a keyboard, processor and electronic output (display). The competitor to IBM was the digital electronic ...
Built the first digital freely programmable computer, the Z1. Built the first functional program-controlled computer, the Z3 in 1941. [59] The Z3 already used what later became known as Reverse Polish Notation, and it was proven to be Turing-complete in 1998. Produced the world's first commercial computer, the Z4. Designed the first high-level ...
Third generation (integrated circuit) computers first appeared in the early 1960s in computers developed for government purposes, and then in commercial computers beginning in the mid-1960s. The first silicon IC computer was the Apollo Guidance Computer or AGC. [169]