ASSIGNMENT:

Explain briefly what happened in the year 1946-1960 in the development of computing
devices.

In 1946, John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert developed the 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). The Ballistics Research Laboratory, or BRL
(the branch of the military responsible for calculating the tables), heard about John
Mauchly's research at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical
Engineering. John Mauchly had previously created several calculating machines, some with
small electric motors inside.

The ENIAC– during World War II, the US government actively sought to support numerous
projects that might assist in solving its diverse problems. Largely as a result of these
wartime needs, the government funded a group of young engineers working at the Moore
School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania,who proposed the first
electronic digital computer to solve ballistic problems. Under the direction of Presper
Eckert Jr. and John Mauchly, the ENIAC was developed during the period 1943 to 1946.
The name ENIAC was an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.
The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors,
1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square
feet (167 square meters) of floor space, weighed 30tons ,consumed 160kilowatts of
electrical power, and, when turned on, caused the city of Philadel phia to experience
brownouts. The principal drawback of ENIAC was its size and its processing ability.

In one second, the ENIAC (one thousand times faster than any other calculating machine to
date) could perform 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions. The use of
vacuum tubes instead of switches and relays created the increase in speed, but it was not a
quick machine to re-program.

EDSAC - Maurice Wilkes, a British scientist at Cambridge University, completed the

EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) two years before EDVAC was
finished. Thus, EDSAC became the first stored-program computer in general use (i.e., not a
prototype).

The EDVAC- In 1946 a Hungarian-born mathematician John von Nueman proposed a

modified version of the ENIAC. The modified version-EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable
Automatic Computer) would differ from the ENIAC in two profoundly important aspects.
First,the EDVAC would employ binary arithmetic. The MARK I and the ENIAC both used
decimal arithmetic in all their calculations. Second, the EDVAC would have stored programs
capability

UNIVAC I- In 1951, the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Calculator), built by Remington

Rand, became one of the first commercially available computers to take advantage of these
advances. Both the U.S. Census Bureau and G eneral Electric owned UNIVACs. One of
UNIVAC's impressive early achievements was predicting the winner of the 1952
presidential election, Dwight D. Eisenhower. It could calculate at the rate of 10,000
additions per second.

IBM 560 – It was designed as a logical upgrade to existing punched-card machines.

IBM 704- In 1957, the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) developed its
own first generation computers called IBM 704 which could perform 100,000 calculations
per second.