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ENIAC I (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator). The U.S. military sponsored their research; they needed a calculating device for writing artillery-firing tables (the settings used for different weapons under varied conditions for target accuracy).
John Mauchly was the chief consultant and J Presper Eckert was the chief engineer. Eckert was a graduate student studying at the Moore School when he met John Mauchly in 1943. It took the team about one year to design the ENIAC and 18 months and 500,000 tax dollars to build it.
The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors.
Transistor – 1947 & Floppy Disk – 1950
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| Transistor
The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley. This was perhaps the most important electronics event of the 20th century, as it later made possible the integrated circuit and microprocessor that are the basis of modern electronics. Prior to the transistor the only alternative to its current regulation and switching functions (TRANSfer resISTOR) was the vacuum tubes, which could only be miniaturized to a certain extent, and wasted a lot of energy in the form of heat.
Compared to vacuum tubes, it offered:
smaller size
better reliability
lower power consumption
lower cost
Floppy Disk – 1950: Invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Yoshiro Nakamats
UNIVAC 1 – 1951
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UNIVAC-1. The first commercially successful electronic computer, UNIVAC I, was also the first general purpose computer - designed to handle both numeric and textual information. It was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The implementation of this machine marked the real beginning of the computer era. Remington Rand delivered the first UNIVAC machine to the U.S. Bureau of Census in 1951. This machine used magnetic tape for input.
first successful commercial computer
design was derived from the ENIAC (same developers)
first client = U.S. Bureau of the Census
$1 million
48 systems built
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