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The University of Manchester's Baby, the world's first electronic stored-program computer, had successfully demonstrated the practicality of the stored-program approach and of the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory based on a standard cathode-ray tube (CRT), by running its first program on 21 June 1948. [6]
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. [112] The machine was not intended to be a practical computer but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first random-access digital storage device. [113]
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals.
Replica of the Atanasoff–Berry computer at Iowa State University The 1946 ENIAC computer used more than 17,000 vacuum tubes. A vacuum-tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry.
Von Neumann's machine design uses a RISC (Reduced instruction set computing) architecture, [dubious – discuss] which means the instruction set uses a total of 21 instructions to perform all tasks. (This is in contrast to CISC, complex instruction set computing , instruction sets which have more instructions from which to choose.)
The Computer History Museum claims to house the largest and most significant collection of computing artifacts in the world. [a] This includes many rare or one-of-a-kind objects such as a Cray-1 supercomputer as well as a Cray-2, Cray-3, the Utah teapot, the 1969 Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, an Apple I, and an example of the first generation of Google's racks of custom-designed web servers. [7]
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 ...
Glenn A. Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program ENIAC in BRL building 328. (U.S. Army photo, c. 1947–1955) 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.