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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.
John William Mauchly (/ ˈ m ɔː k l i / MAWK-lee; August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.
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.
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.
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 Cray-2, released in 1985, was a four-processor liquid cooled computer totally immersed in a tank of Fluorinert, which bubbled as it operated. [10] It reached 1.9 gigaflops and was the world's fastest supercomputer, and the first to break the gigaflop barrier. [ 25 ]
The LEO I computer (Lyons Electronic Office) became operational in April 1951 [129] and ran the world's first regular routine office computer job. On 17 November 1951, the J. Lyons company began weekly operation of a bakery valuations job on the LEO – the first business application to go live on a stored-program computer.
The UNIVAC Solid State was a magnetic drum-based solid-state computer announced by Sperry Rand in December 1958 as a response to the IBM 650.It was one of the first [1] [2] [citation needed] computers offered for sale to be (nearly) entirely solid-state, using 700 transistors, and 3000 magnetic amplifiers (FERRACTOR) for primary logic, and 20 vacuum tubes largely for power control.