Electromechanical
Era ( 1890 - 1946)
- Electricity involved in
the use of computational devices
- Herman Hollerith (1890)
- Civil servant
- Created a calculator that
used electrical signals to turn gears
- Used in U.S. Census and
reduced the time from 13 years to 6 weeks
- Created Tabulating Machine
Company
- Telephone availability
becoming widespread (1900's)
- International Business
Machines (1924)
- Thomas Watson took over
Tabulating Machine company from Hollerith and changed the name
- Mark
I (1944)
- Developed by Howard Aiken
(Harvard) and Thomas Watson (IBM) for the Military to compute
missile trajectories and break codes
- used relays instead of
gears
- Size - 17 m long, 3 m
high, 760,000 parts, 500 miles of wire
- light bulbs represented
base 10 numbers, every fifteen minutes a bulb would blow
- Noisey "roomful of
old ladies knitting with steel needles
- First
Computer "Bug" found
- Zuse
(Germany - 1941)
- Developed first
fully functional program-controlled electromechanical digital
computer
- Prototype developed but
Hitler stopped its inception
- Money put into development
of V2 rockets