Computing History 1947-1951

1947 –The transistor

Invented by William Shockley (seated) John Bardeen & Walter Brattain at Bell Labs.
The transistor replaces bulky vacuum tubes with a smaller, more reliable, and power saving solid sate circuit.

1951 – UNIVAC

First commercial computer -  Between 1951 and 1958, 47 UNIVAC I computers were delivered.

1951 – UNIVAC Mercury delay unit (1 of 7)þ

UNIVAC mercury delay units containing 18 delay lines, each of which stored 120 bits. Total of 2,160 bits, or 144 fifteen bit words per memory unit.

1951 – UNIVAC

UNIVAC tape units.

1951 – UNIVAC

UNIVAC tube board and individual vacuum tube.

Computing History 1943/1944/1946

1943/1944 – Colossus Mark I & II.

The Colossus Mark I & II are widely acknowledged as the first programmable electric computers, and were used at Bletchley Park to decode German codes encrypted by the Lorenz SZ40/42.

1946–John Eckert & John W. Mauchly ENIAC 1 Computer.

ENIAC was short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. It was the first general

purpose (programmable to solve any problem) electric computer. It contained over 17,000

vacuum tubes, weighed 27 tones and drew 150 kW of power to operate.

Computing History 1936, 1944.

1936 – Konrad Zuse – Z1 Computer

First freely programmable computer, electro-mechanical punch tape control.

1944 – Howard Aiken & Grace Hopper

Harvard Mark I Computer

The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) Computer was created by IBM for Harvard University, which called it the Mark I. First universal calculator.

Alan Turing 1912-1954 Computing History.

1.    British mathematician and cryptographer.

2.    Father of theoretical computer science.

3.    Contributions include:

     a.    Turing Machine

     b.    Turing Test (for AI)‏

     c.    First detailed design of a stored program computer (never built)‏

4.    The Turing Machine is a simpler version of Kurt Gödel's formal languages.

5.    Halting problem is undecidable.

Alonzo Church 1903-1995 computing history

American mathematician and logician. Developed lambda calculus, directly implemented by LISP and other functional programming languages. Showed the existence of an undecidable problem. Lambda calculus was proven to be equivalent to a Turning Machine by Church and Turing working together.

Kurt Gödel 1906-1978 computing History.

Kurt Gödel 1906-1978

Famous for his incompleteness theorem

This theorem implies that not all mathematical questions are computable (can be solved).

The Right Honourable Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace computing history

The Right Honourable Augusta Ada,
Created a program for the (theoretical) Babbage analytical engine which would have calculated Bernoulli numbers.
Widely recognized as the first programmer.