The Modern Computer
Many men worked on the digital concept. Aiken, who built the electromechanical Mark I at Harvard, and Williams in England are representative. But two scientists at the University of Pennsylvania get the credit for the world’s first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, a 30-ton, 150-kilowatt machine using vacuum tubes and semiconductor diodes and handling discrete numbers instead of continuous values as in the analog machine. The modern computer dates from ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.
Shannon’s work and the thinking of others in the field indicated the power of the digital, yes-no, approach. A single switch can only be on or off, but many such switches properly interconnected can do amazing things. At first these switches were electromechanical; in the Eckert-Mauchly ENIAC, completed for the government in 1946, vacuum tubes in the Eccles-Jordan “flip-flop” circuit married electronics and the computer. The progeny have been many, and their generations faster than those of man. ENIAC has been followed by BINAC and MANIAC, and even JOHNNIAC. UNIVAC and RECOMP and STRETCH and LARC and a whole host of other machines have been produced. At the start of 1962 there were some 6,000 electronic digital computers in service; by year’s end there will be 8,000. The golden age of the computer may be here, but as we have seen, it did not come overnight. The revolution has been slow, gathering early momentum with the golden wheels of Homer’s mechanical information-seeking vehicles that brought the word from the gods. Where it goes from here depends on us, and maybe on the computer itself.
“Theory is the guide to practice, and practice is the ratification and life of theory.”
—John Weiss