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The first English use of the word "data" is from the 1640s. The word "data" was first used to mean "transmissible and storable computer information" in 1946. The expression "data processing" was first used in 1954. [6] When "data" is used more generally as a synonym for "information", it is treated as a mass noun in singular form.
A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [] read the truest computer of Times, and the best ...
Data exists in three states: data at rest, data in transit and data in use. Data within a computer, in most cases, moves as parallel data. Data moving to or from a computer, in most cases, moves as serial data. Data sourced from an analog device, such as a temperature sensor, may be converted to digital using an analog-to-digital converter.
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 ...
Software timekeeping systems vary widely in the resolution of time measurement; some systems may use time units as large as a day, while others may use nanoseconds.For example, for an epoch date of midnight UTC (00:00) on 1 January 1900, and a time unit of a second, the time of the midnight (24:00) between 1 January 1900 and 2 January 1900 is represented by the number 86400, the number of ...
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.
The first departure from what was possible prior to vacuum tubes was the incorporation of large memories that could store thousands of bits of data and randomly access them at high speeds. That, in turn, allowed the storage of machine instructions in the same memory as data—the stored program concept, a breakthrough which today is a hallmark ...
[citation needed] [example needed] DEC wrote, regarding their PDP-5, that it was "the world’s first commercially produced minicomputer". [9] It meets most definitions of "mini" in terms of power and size, but was designed and built to be used as an instrumentation system in labs, not as a general-purpose computer. [10]