40s of the 20th century in the history of computer science

1941

In 1941, IBM engineer B.Phelps began work on creating decimal electronic meters for tabulators, and in 1942 created an experimental model of an electronic multiplying device.

On May 31, 1941, the Z3 (on electromechanical relays) was successfully tested - the world's first software-controlled computer that performed operations on floating-point numbers represented in binary number system and had Boolean logic circuits. The creator of this machine was a German engineer Conrad Zouze.

Home Computer Magazine №12-2002 BEBBIDGE HEIRS

Newspaper "INFORMATIKA" ENGINEER

1942

In 1942, the American physicist John Mouchli (John Mauchly, 1907-1980), after a detailed acquaintance with the Atanasoff project, presented his own computer project. The work on the computer project ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer - electronic numerical integrator and calculator) under the leadership of John Mouchli and John Eckert (John Presper Eckert) involved 200 people. In the spring of 1945, the computer was built, and in February 1946 it was declassified. ENIAC, which contains 178468 electron tubes of six different types, 7200 crystal diodes, 4100 magnetic elements, occupying an area of ​​300 square meters, 1000 times faster than relay computers.

The computer will live for nine years and will last be included in 1955.

The engineer connects the cables with which the ENIAC machine was programmed.

Collossus

Simultaneously with the construction of ENIAC , also in secrecy, computers were created in the UK. Secrecy was necessary because a device was designed to decipher the codes used by the German armed forces during the Second World War (the famous Enigma encryption machine). The mathematical decryption method was developed by a group of mathematicians, including Alan Turing. During 1943, the Colossus was built on a 1500 vacuum tube in London. The developers of the machine are M.Newman and T.F. Flowers .

Enigma Encryption Machine

This is how the Colossus punched tape input device looked like.

The input speed was huge: 50,000 characters per second. At such a speed, a flying ribbon of thick thin paper can cut through the human body as well as a razor. After the end of the Second World War, the computers of Colossus were destroyed, the secrecy was utterly complete. The first information about these machines appeared only in 1970, after the declassification of a number of American documents. In 1994, a society was created to restore these computers, two years later two-digit mode was launched, and ten years later, in 2004, it started working at full capacity!

Although ENIAC and Colossus worked on electron tubes, they essentially copied electromechanical machines: the new content (electronics) was squeezed into the old form (the structure of the pre-electronic machines).

ENIAC

1944

In 1937, Harvard mathematician Howard Aiken (Howard Aiken) proposed a project to create a large counting machine. The work was sponsored by the president of IBM, Thomas Watson (Tomas Watson), who invested $ 500,000 in it. Design Mark-1 began in 1939, built this computer New York-based IBM. The computer contained about 750 thousand parts, 3304 relays and more than 800 km of wires.

Mark I (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator is a sequence controlled automatic calculator) is one of the first operating computers with program control (the original name is “Computer with automatic control of sequence of operations”)

In 1944, the finished car was officially transferred to Harvard University.

In 1944, American engineer John Eckert (John Presper Eckert) first introduced the concept of a program stored in computer memory.

A sailor servicing the Mark-2 enters information from a punched tape that controls his work.

Aiken, who possessed the intellectual resources of Harvard and the efficient Mark-1 machine, received several orders from the military. So the next model - the Mark-2 was ordered by the US Navy's weapons control. Design began in 1945, and construction ended in 1947. The Mark-2 was the first multi-tasking machine — having multiple tires allowed you to simultaneously transfer several numbers from one part of the computer to another.

Reader Mark-1

Newspaper "INFORMATIKA" №48-2001 FAMILY "MARK"

1945

VENNIVER BUSH (Vannevar Bush, 11.03.1890-30.06.1974) first outlined the idea of ​​creating hypertext in the article “While we think”, which was published in the journal “The Atlantic Monthly”.

In 1945, under the leadership of John Mauchly and John Eckert , the design of the first EDVAC computer with a stored program was developed.

1946

February 15, 1946 in the United States, a demonstration of the work of ENIAC (from Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer - electronic digital integrator and computer) - the first successfully operated electronic digital computer.

John von Neumann (Neumann Janos), 12.28.1903 - 08.02.1957, on the basis of a critical analysis of the ENIAC design, proposed a number of new computer organization ideas, including the concept of a stored program, i.e. storing the program in a storage device. As a result of the implementation of the ideas of von Neumann, a computer architecture was created, in many respects preserved to this day.

Newspaper "INFORMATIKA"
WUNDERKIND (American mathematician and physicist John von Neumann)

In 1946, the eminent American statistical statistician John Tukey (adviser to the five presidents of the United States) proposed the name BIT (BIT - an abbreviation of BInary digiT). Tukey chose a bit to indicate one binary digit capable of taking the value 0 or 1.

For reference
unit information values

Werner Buchholz in 1956 in the early stages of designing an IBM Stretch computer coined the term BYTE .

The weekly "Computerworld" №42-2001 WHAT IS RAV YOTTABYTE?

1947

NORBERT WINER (Wiener Norbert, 11/26/1984 - 03/18/1964) introduces the term "cybernetics".

In 1946, the group led by William Bradford Shockley (William Bredford Chockley, February 13, 1910 - August 12, 1989) was established at the Bell Telephone Laboratories laboratory, conducting studies of the properties of semiconductors on Silicon (Sc) and Germany (Ge). The group conducted both theoretical and experimental studies of physical processes at the interface of two semiconductors with different types of electrical conductivity. As a result, three-electrode semiconductor devices - TRANSISTORS were invented . Success was achieved on December 23, 1947. Information about this invention appeared in the journal "The Physical Review" in July 1948.

First transistor

The invention of transistors was a significant milestone in the history of electronics and its authors John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Bredford Chockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1956.

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Bredford Chockley

1948

In 1948 SERGEI ALEXANDROVICHEM LEBEDEV (1890-1974) and B.I.Rameev proposed the first draft of a domestic digital electronic computer. Under the leadership of Academician S.A. Lebedev. and Glushkova V.M. domestic computers are developed: first MESM - a small electronic counting machine (1951, Kiev), then BESM - a high-speed electronic counting machine (1952, Moscow). In parallel with them were created Strela, Ural, Minsk, Hrazdan, Nairi.

Newspaper "INFORMATIKA"
FIRST IN EUROPE (In 1947, in Kiev, at the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, under the leadership of Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev, the first domestic computer was created - MESM)

Design documentation
and folders with materials about the first domestic computer,
many of which are compiled by S.A. Lebedev.

Lev Naumovich Dashevsky, next to him Zoya Sergeyevna Rapota. Lidia Mikhailovna Abalyshnikova, Tamara Ivanovna Petsuh and Evgeniy Evgenyevich Dedeshko are at the console.
Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Kiev. 1951

The American mathematician NOBERT Wiener published the book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in Animals and Machines, which marked the beginning of the development of the theory of automata and the formation of cybernetics - the science of control and information transfer. Also Claude Shannon publishes the book The Mathematical Theory of Information Transfer.

Wang An ( 02/07/1920 - 03/24/1990), American engineer and entrepreneur of Chinese origin; The founder of the computer company, Wang Laboratories, invented the magnetic core memory that was used in computers before the appearance of chips.

Wang An

Tom Kilburn, 1998

The world's first electronic digital computer with a stored program, which was named Baby , was created at the University of Manchester. On June 21, 1948, the first program written by Tom Kilburn for Baby was successfully completed. Subsequently, the Baby was finalized and sold under the name Mark 1 .

Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams next to Baby

The authors of the computer were English scientists Tom Kilburn (Tom Kilburn, 08/11/1921-17.01.2001 ) and Freddie Williams (Freddie Williams, 1911-1977) from the University of Manchester.

The car weighed one ton, consisted of 600 radio tubes and had a memory of 1024 bits, the instruction set was 7 instructions.

Manchester Mark-1

Freddie Williams

1949

Maurice Wilks

In May 1949, in England, he earned the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, electronic automatic computer with memory on delay lines) —the first operating computer with a stored program — designer Maurice Vincent Wilkes (06/26/1913–29.11.2010) and employees of the mathematical laboratory of the University of Cambridge (UK). The EDSAC computer contained 3,000 electron tubes and was six times more productive than its predecessors.

EDSAC I, W. Renwick, M.Wilkes

Maurice Wilkes introduced a system of mnemonic symbols for machine instructions, called assembly language .

John Mauchly created the first programming language interpreter called "Short Order Code".

CSIRAC (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer, Automatic Computer Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) - the first Australian digital computer and the fourth in the world of computers with a stored program. It was originally known as CSIR Mk 1. The first computer on which digital music was played, and the only surviving computer of the first generation.

CSIRAC is a representative representative of the first tube generation of computers. The computing machine included approximately 2000 electron tubes. Mercury delay lines were used as the main data repository.

Data entry was carried out using punched tape. The machine was controlled through a console (console), which allowed to execute programs on a special CRT monitor step by step, which displayed the status of registers.
Data output was carried out on a standard teletype or punched tape.

CSIRAC in the Melbourne Museum