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It started with the dinasors. The first UNIVAC computer (Universal Automatic Computer is developed in 1951. It can store 12,000 digits in random access mercury-delay lines) was delivered to the Census Bureau in June 1951. Internally, the UNIVAC operated at a clock frequency of 2.25 MHz, which was no mean feat for vacuum tube circuits. The UNIVAC also employed mercury delay-line memories. Unlike the ENIAC,(electronic numerical integrator and computer) --the world's first electronic digital computer the UNIVAC processed each digit serially. But its much higher design speed permitted it to add two ten-digit numbers at a rate of almost 100,000 additions per second. The machine designed by Drs. Eckert and Mauchly was a monstrosity. When it was finished, the ENIAC filled an entire room, weighed thirty tons, and consumed two hundred kilowatts of power. Vacuum tubes, over 19,000 of them, were the principal elements in the computer's circuitry. It also had fifteen hundred relays and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Too soon, Charles, sadly. A century and a half ago Charles Babbage, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, devised his Analytical Engine, which embodied most of the concepts which we now take for granted in the digital computer. But those concepts were far ahead of the available technology. The man Maurice Vincent Wilkes, finally brought to its fullest reality Babbage's dream, by providing the computer with the one vital organ which it still lacked: a capacious memory. He converted a program and its data, punched onto paper tape, into ultrasonic pulses, and he fed the pulses into a tube of memory, which delayed their progress, and he caused the pulses to circulate indefinitely. And so EDSAC was born, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, the first full operational computer with its own memory. From all sides they flocked to admire it, and stayed to use it. Soon it was performing the vital calculations by which our chemists and radio-astronomers perfected their Nobel Prize-winning work. On those glorious pioneering days he has never ceased to build. Spreadsheets are born. Years later,while at Harvard, Bricklin began to formulate the groundwork for something that would eventually lead to his, and one of the computer industries, most influential products ever, VisiCalc.
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