124-624: UNIVAC ( Universal Automatic Computer ) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation . Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and successor organizations. The BINAC , built by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, was the first general-purpose computer for commercial use, but it
248-521: A binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at that time. The Z3 was not itself a universal computer but could be extended to be Turing complete . Zuse's next computer, the Z4 , became the world's first commercial computer; after initial delay due to the Second World War, it was completed in 1950 and delivered to
372-632: A central processing unit (CPU) in the form of a microprocessor , together with some type of computer memory , typically semiconductor memory chips. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logical operations, and a sequencing and control unit can change the order of operations in response to stored information . Peripheral devices include input devices ( keyboards , mice , joysticks , etc.), output devices ( monitors , printers , etc.), and input/output devices that perform both functions (e.g. touchscreens ). Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source, and they enable
496-419: A keyboard , and computed and printed the results, demonstrating the feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine. During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation . However, these were not programmable and generally lacked
620-524: A mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of specialized applications. At the University of Manchester , a team under the leadership of Tom Kilburn designed and built a machine using the newly developed transistors instead of valves. Their first transistorized computer and the first in the world, was operational by 1953 , and a second version was completed there in April 1955. However,
744-429: A monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip. Kilby's IC had external wire connections, which made it difficult to mass-produce. Noyce also came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year later than Kilby. Noyce's invention was the first true monolithic IC chip. His chip solved many practical problems that Kilby's had not. Produced at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was made of silicon , whereas Kilby's chip
868-496: A " poison pill " in the form of a major share price hike to dissuade the hostile bid, the result of which caused Burroughs to borrow much more funding than was anticipated to complete the bid. Certain internal divisions of Sperry were sold off after the merger, such as Sperry New Holland (1986, to Ford Motor Company , who in 1991 sold the Ford-New Holland line to Fiat ) and Sperry Marine (to Tenneco , in 1987, and
992-652: A 1998 retrospective, it was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project began at the university to develop it into a practically useful computer, the Manchester Mark 1 . The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1 , the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. Built by Ferranti , it
1116-455: A 4K operating system and was programmed in the PAL assembly language. The 1050 was used extensively by the U.S. Air Force supply system for inventory control (The Standard Base Level Supply System ). The UNIVAC 1004 was a plug-board programmed punched-card data processing system, introduced in 1962 by UNIVAC. Total memory was 961 characters (6 bits per character) of core memory . Peripherals were
1240-512: A Chip (SoCs) are complete computers on a microchip (or chip) the size of a coin. They may or may not have integrated RAM and flash memory . If not integrated, the RAM is usually placed directly above (known as Package on package ) or below (on the opposite side of the circuit board ) the SoC, and the flash memory is usually placed right next to the SoC. This is done to improve data transfer speeds, as
1364-419: A card reader (400 cards/minute), a card punch (200 cards/minute) using proprietary 90-column, round-hole cards or IBM-compatible, 80-column cards, a drum printer (400 lines/minute) and a Uniservo tape drive. The 1004 was also supported as a remote card reader & printer via synchronous communication services. A U.S. Navy (Weapons Station, Concord) 1004 was dedicated to printing from tape as a means of offloading
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#17327833647661488-543: A computer called BINAC (BINary Automatic Computer) for Northrop Aviation (which was little used, or perhaps not at all). Afterwards began the development of UNIVAC in April 1946. UNIVAC was first intended for the Bureau of the Census , which paid for much of the development, and then was put in production. With the death of EMCC's chairman and chief financial backer Henry L. Straus in a plane crash on October 25, 1949, EMCC
1612-476: A computer services and outsourcing firm, competing at that time in the same marketplace as IBM , Electronic Data Systems (EDS), and Computer Sciences Corporation . As of 2021, Unisys continues to design and manufacture enterprise class computers with the ClearPath server lines. In the course of its history, UNIVAC produced a number of separate model ranges. One early UNIVAC line of vacuum tube computers
1736-752: A lifetime to figure out." Heavey told the subcommittee it was needed to help with mobilization and other issues similar to the invasion of Normandy that were based on the relationships of various groups. The UNIVAC was manufactured at Remington Rand's former Eckert-Mauchly Division plant on W Allegheny Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . Remington Rand also had an engineering research lab in Norwalk, Connecticut , and later bought Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in St. Paul, Minnesota . In 1953 or 1954 Remington Rand merged their Norwalk tabulating machine division,
1860-565: A list of the General Managers/Presidents of the Division. There was a some degree of internal organisation turmoil from the period of the creation of Sperry Rand in 1955 right into the early 1960s. This culminated in the resignation of William Norris in 1957 and would continue until the early 1960s with the decentralisation of the former Remington Group and the promotion of UNIVAC to a full division of Sperry Rand. In
1984-523: A major military contractor. From 1967 to 1973 the corporation was involved in an acrimonious antitrust lawsuit with Honeywell , Inc. (see Honeywell v. Sperry Rand ). In 1961, Sperry Rand was ranked 34th on the Fortune 500 list of largest companies in the United States. In 1977, Sperry Rand purchased Varian Data Machines so as to enter the minicomputer market. Varian would be renamed as
2108-403: A medieval European counting house , a checkered cloth would be placed on a table, and markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid to calculating sums of money. The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer , according to Derek J. de Solla Price . It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in
2232-525: A much more general design, an analytical engine , was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards , a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom . For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The engine would incorporate an arithmetic logic unit , control flow in
2356-529: A number of successes at breaking encrypted German military communications. The German encryption machine, Enigma , was first attacked with the help of the electro-mechanical bombes which were often run by women. To crack the more sophisticated German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine, used for high-level Army communications, Max Newman and his colleagues commissioned Flowers to build the Colossus . He spent eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building
2480-562: A sequence of sets of values. The whole machine was to be controlled by a read-only program, which was complete with provisions for conditional branching . He also introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic . In 1920, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the arithmometer , Torres presented in Paris the Electromechanical Arithmometer, which allowed a user to input arithmetic problems through
2604-460: A successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906. In his work Essays on Automatics published in 1914, Leonardo Torres Quevedo wrote a brief history of Babbage's efforts at constructing a mechanical Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. The paper contains a design of a machine capable to calculate formulas like a x ( y − z ) 2 {\displaystyle a^{x}(y-z)^{2}} , for
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#17327833647662728-471: A three pass assembler and a program generator. The UNIVAC 1100/2200 series is a series of compatible 36-bit transistorized computer systems initially made by Sperry Rand. The first true member of the series was the 1107, also known as the Thin-Film Computer due to its use of Thin-film memory for its Control Memory store (128 registers). Delivery of the 1107 was late and this affected sales;
2852-487: A transaction-processing environment, allowed programs to be written in COBOL whereas similar programs on competing systems were written in assembly language. On later systems, EXEC 8 was renamed OS 1100 and OS 2200 , with modern descendants maintaining backwards compatibility. Some more exotic operating systems ran on the 1108 – one of which was RTOS, a more bare-bones system designed to take better advantage of
2976-402: A universal Turing machine. Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing its function required the re-wiring and re-structuring of the machine. With the proposal of the stored-program computer this changed. A stored-program computer includes by design an instruction set and can store in memory a set of instructions (a program ) that details the computation . The theoretical basis for
3100-520: A virtually infinite lifetime. The magnetic gates required drive pulses of current produced by a transmitter-type vacuum tube, of a type still used in amateur radio final amplifiers. Thus the Solid State depended, at the heart of its operations, on a vacuum tube, however, only a few tubes were required, instead of thousands, greatly increasing reliability. Sperry Rand began shipment of UNIVAC III in 1962, and produced 96 UNIVAC III systems. Unlike
3224-577: A wide range of tasks. The term computer system may refer to a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware , operating system , software , and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation; or to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster . A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems , including simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls , and factory devices like industrial robots . Computers are at
3348-557: A wide variety of other gyroscope -based aviation instruments like autopilots , bombsights , analog ballistics computers and gyro gunsights . In the post-WWII era the company branched out into electronics, both aviation-related, and later, computers. The company was founded by Elmer Ambrose Sperry . The company was incorporated on April 14 1910 by Elmer Ambrose Sperry as the Sperry Gyroscope Company , to manufacture navigation equipment—chiefly his own inventions:
3472-534: Is currently part of Northrop Grumman ). Also sold—to Honeywell —was Sperry Aerospace Group , while Sperry Defense Products Group was sold to Loral ; those two units whose functions were originally at the heart of the venerable Sperry Gyroscope division. This group is now part of Lockheed Martin . Sperry in Britain started with a factory in Pimlico , London, in 1913, manufacturing gyroscopic compasses for
3596-463: Is the stored program , where all the instructions for computing are stored in memory. Von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper. Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation . Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, modern computers are said to be Turing-complete , which is to say, they have algorithm execution capability equivalent to
3720-619: The Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera , between Kythera and Crete , and has been dated to approximately c. 100 BCE . Devices of comparable complexity to the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until the fourteenth century. Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in
3844-559: The British Aerospace brand. State of the art, high technology MEMS gyroscopes (together with other avionics equipment) are still made on the site today, although the company is now owned by United Technologies Corporation and is part of UTC Aerospace Systems . The name Sperry lives on in the company Sperry Marine , headquartered in New Malden , England. This company, formed in 1997, from three well-known brand names in
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3968-507: The E6B circular slide rule used for time and distance calculations on light aircraft. In the 1770s, Pierre Jaquet-Droz , a Swiss watchmaker , built a mechanical doll ( automaton ) that could write holding a quill pen. By switching the number and order of its internal wheels different letters, and hence different messages, could be produced. In effect, it could be mechanically "programmed" to read instructions. Along with two other complex machines,
4092-641: The ETH Zurich . The computer was manufactured by Zuse's own company, Zuse KG , which was founded in 1941 as the first company with the sole purpose of developing computers in Berlin. The Z4 served as the inspiration for the construction of the ERMETH , the first Swiss computer and one of the first in Europe. Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, at
4216-601: The Lawrence Sperry Aircraft Company , including the new automatic pilot . After the death of Lawrence on December 13, 1923, the two firms were brought together in 1924. Then in January 1929 it was acquired by North American Aviation , who reincorporated it in New York as the Sperry Gyroscope Company, Inc . The company once again became independent in 1933 when it was spun-off as a subsidiary of
4340-632: The Royal Navy . It became the Sperry Gyroscope Co Ltd in 1915. In 1923, Lawrence Sperry was killed in an air crash near Rye, Sussex . The company subsequently expanded to the Golden Mile , Brentford in 1931, Stonehouse , Gloucestershire in 1938, and Bracknell in 1957. By 1963, these sites employed some 3,500 people. The Brentford site closed in 1967, with the expansion of Bracknell. Stonehouse closed around 1969. By 1969,
4464-497: The microcomputer revolution in the 1970s. The speed, power, and versatility of computers have been increasing dramatically ever since then, with transistor counts increasing at a rapid pace ( Moore's law noted that counts doubled every two years), leading to the Digital Revolution during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Conventionally, a modern computer consists of at least one processing element , typically
4588-504: The "second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on
4712-525: The 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others developed mechanical differential analyzers. In the 1890s, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo began to develop a series of advanced analog machines that could solve real and complex roots of polynomials , which were published in 1901 by the Paris Academy of Sciences . Charles Babbage , an English mechanical engineer and polymath , originated
4836-435: The 1960s, UNIVAC was one of the eight major American computer companies in an industry then referred to as " IBM and the seven dwarfs" – a play on Snow White and the seven dwarfs, with IBM, by far the largest, being cast as Snow White and the other seven as being dwarfs: Burroughs , Univac, NCR , CDC , GE , RCA and Honeywell . In the 1970s, after GE sold its computer business to Honeywell and RCA sold its to Univac,
4960-404: The 20th century. Sperry ceased to exist in 1986 following a prolonged hostile takeover bid engineered by Burroughs Corporation , which merged the combined operation under the new name Unisys . Some of Sperry's former divisions became part of Honeywell , Lockheed Martin , Raytheon Technologies , and Northrop Grumman . The company is best known as the developer of the artificial horizon and
5084-619: The Cambridge EDSAC of 1949, became operational in April 1951 and ran the world's first routine office computer job . The concept of a field-effect transistor was proposed by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain , while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs , built the first working transistor , the point-contact transistor , in 1947, which was followed by Shockley's bipolar junction transistor in 1948. From 1955 onwards, transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to
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5208-591: The EDVAC in 1945. The Manchester Baby was the world's first stored-program computer . It was built at the University of Manchester in England by Frederic C. Williams , Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill , and ran its first program on 21 June 1948. It was designed as a testbed for the Williams tube , the first random-access digital storage device. Although the computer was described as "small and primitive" by
5332-455: The ENIAC were six women, often known collectively as the "ENIAC girls". It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000 times a second, a thousand times faster than any other machine. It also had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was limited to 20 words (about 80 bytes). Built under
5456-633: The ERA "scientific" computer division, and the UNIVAC "business" computer division into a single division under the UNIVAC name. This severely annoyed those who had been with ERA and with the Norwalk laboratory. In 1955 Remington Rand merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand. General Douglas MacArthur , then the chairman of the Board of Directors of Remington Rand, was chosen to continue in that role in
5580-531: The MOS transistor, was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960 and was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturized and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. With its high scalability , and much lower power consumption and higher density than bipolar junction transistors, the MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits . In addition to data processing, it also enabled
5704-564: The Remington Rand acquisition, Sperry Gyroscope decided to open a facility that would almost exclusively produce its marine instruments. After considerable searching and evaluation, a plant was built in Charlottesville, Virginia , and in 1956, Sperry Piedmont Division began producing marine navigation products. It was later renamed Sperry Marine . In the 1970s, Sperry Corporation was a traditional conglomerate headquartered in
5828-455: The Scottish scientist Sir William Thomson in 1872 was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location. The differential analyser , a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration , used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform
5952-647: The Sperry Gyroscope division of Sperry Rand Corporation employed around 2,500. The site of the Bracknell factory and development center (sold to British Aerospace in 1982) is commemorated by a 4.5-meter aluminum sculpture by Philip Bentham , Sperry's New Symbolic Gyroscope (1967). In 1989, the Bracknell site was downsized and work was moved to the Sperry manufacturing site in Plymouth by then under
6076-619: The Sperry Rand Building at 1290 Avenue of Americas in Manhattan, selling typewriters (Sperry Remington); office equipment, electronic digital computers for business and the military (Sperry Univac); construction and farm equipment (Sperry New Holland); avionics, such as gyroscopes, radars, air route traffic control equipment (Sperry Vickers/Sperry Flight Systems); and consumer products such as electric razors (Sperry Remington). In addition, Sperry Systems Management (headquartered in
6200-566: The Sperry UNIVAC Minicomputer Operation, operating as part of the Sperry UNIVAC division. In 1978, Sperry Rand decided to concentrate on its computing interests, and sold a number of divisions including Remington Rand Systems, Remington Rand Machines, Ford Instrument Company and Sperry Vickers . The company dropped "Rand" from its title and reverted to Sperry Corporation . At about the same time as
6324-472: The Sperry acquisition of RCA CSD. After VMOS was ported to the 90/60, Univac renamed it VS/9 . UNIVAC has been, over the years, a registered trademark of: Computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation ). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs . These programs enable computers to perform
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#17327833647666448-493: The U.S. Although the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus, it was much faster, more flexible, and it was Turing-complete. Like the Colossus, a "program" on the ENIAC was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored program electronic machines that came later. Once a program was written, it had to be mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. The programmers of
6572-498: The UNIVAC ;I and UNIVAC II, it was a binary machine as well as maintaining support for all UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II decimal and alphanumeric data formats for backward compatibility. This was the last of the original UNIVAC machines. The UNIVAC 418 (aka 1219), first shipped in 1962, was an 18-bit word core memory machine. Over the three different models, more than 392 systems were manufactured. The UNIVAC 490
6696-586: The US, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942, the first "automatic electronic digital computer". This design was also all-electronic and used about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory. During World War II, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park achieved
6820-625: The Uniservo VI. The UNIVAC Series 90 : The 1107 was the first 36-bit, word-oriented machine with an architecture close to that which came to be known as that of the " 1100 Series ." It ran the EXEC I or EXEC II operating system, batch-oriented second-generation operating systems , typical of the early to mid-1960s. The 1108 ran EXEC II or EXEC 8 . EXEC 8 allowed simultaneous handling of real-time applications, time-sharing , and background batch work. Transaction Interface Package (TIP),
6944-492: The V77 but never made a significant dent in the minicomputer market. To assist "corporate identity" the name was changed to Sperry Univac, along with Sperry Remington, Sperry New Holland , etc. In 1978, Sperry Rand, a conglomerate of various divisions (computers, typewriters, office furniture, hay balers, manure spreaders, gyroscopes, avionics, radar, electric razors), decided to concentrate solely on its computing interests and all of
7068-898: The advent of the integrated circuit (IC). The idea of the integrated circuit was first conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the Ministry of Defence , Geoffrey W.A. Dummer . Dummer presented the first public description of an integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. , on 7 May 1952. The first working ICs were invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor . Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning
7192-427: The analogy to the seven dwarfs became less apt and the remaining small firms became known as the " BUNCH " ( B urroughs, U nivac, N CR, C ontrol Data, and H oneywell). In 1977, Sperry Rand purchased Varian Data Machines so as to enter the minicomputer market. Varian would be renamed as the Sperry UNIVAC Minicomputer Operation, operating as part of the Sperry UNIVAC division. Sperry UNIVAC would continue to market
7316-647: The basic concept which underlies all electronic digital computers. By 1938, the United States Navy had developed an electromechanical analog computer small enough to use aboard a submarine . This was the Torpedo Data Computer , which used trigonometry to solve the problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. During World War II similar devices were developed in other countries as well. Early digital computers were electromechanical ; electric switches drove mechanical relays to perform
7440-530: The best Arithmetician that euer [ sic ] breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number." This usage of the term referred to a human computer , a person who carried out calculations or computations . The word continued to have the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. During the latter part of this period, women were often hired as computers because they could be paid less than their male counterparts. By 1943, most human computers were women. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives
7564-570: The calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes . The Z2 , created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939 in Berlin , was one of the earliest examples of an electromechanical relay computer. In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3 , the world's first working electromechanical programmable , fully automatic digital computer. The Z3
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#17327833647667688-542: The company's first digital computer, SPEEDAC , in 1953. During the 1950s, a large part of Sperry Gyroscope moved to Phoenix , Arizona and soon became the Sperry Flight Systems Company. This was to preserve parts of this defense company in the event of a nuclear war . The Gyroscope division remained headquartered in New York—in its massive Lake Success , Long Island, plant (which also served as
7812-565: The concept of a programmable computer. Considered the " father of the computer ", he conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his difference engine he announced his invention in 1822, in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society , titled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables". He also designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that
7936-704: The core of general-purpose devices such as personal computers and mobile devices such as smartphones . Computers power the Internet , which links billions of computers and users. Early computers were meant to be used only for calculations. Simple manual instruments like the abacus have aided people in doing calculations since ancient times. Early in the Industrial Revolution , some mechanical devices were built to automate long, tedious tasks, such as guiding patterns for looms . More sophisticated electrical machines did specialized analog calculations in
8060-404: The crew showed some staged theatrics that suggested the computer was not responsive, and announced it was predicting 8–7 odds for an Eisenhower win (the actual prediction was 100–1 in his favour). When the predictions proved true—Eisenhower defeated Stevenson in a landslide, with UNIVAC coming within 3.5% of his popular vote total and four votes of his Electoral College total— Charles Collingwood ,
8184-499: The data signals do not have to travel long distances. Since ENIAC in 1945, computers have advanced enormously, with modern SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 865) being the size of a coin while also being hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than ENIAC, integrating billions of transistors, and consuming only a few watts of power. The first mobile computers were heavy and ran from mains power. The 50 lb (23 kg) IBM 5100
8308-515: The decision of the British Government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to political and financial difficulties as well as his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than anyone else could follow. Nevertheless, his son, Henry Babbage , completed a simplified version of the analytical engine's computing unit (the mill ) in 1888. He gave
8432-460: The direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full operation at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, using 200 kilowatts of electric power and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. The principle of
8556-431: The doll is at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel , Switzerland , and still operates. In 1831–1835, mathematician and engineer Giovanni Plana devised a Perpetual Calendar machine , which through a system of pulleys and cylinders could predict the perpetual calendar for every year from 0 CE (that is, 1 BCE) to 4000 CE, keeping track of leap years and varying day length. The tide-predicting machine invented by
8680-422: The early 11th century. The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BCE and is often attributed to Hipparchus . A combination of the planisphere and dioptra , the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy . An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer and gear -wheels
8804-500: The early 2000s. These smartphones and tablets run on a variety of operating systems and recently became the dominant computing device on the market. These are powered by System on a Chip (SoCs), which are complete computers on a microchip the size of a coin. Computers can be classified in a number of different ways, including: Sperry Corporation Sperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of
8928-399: The early 20th century. The first digital electronic calculating machines were developed during World War II , both electromechanical and using thermionic valves . The first semiconductor transistors in the late 1940s were followed by the silicon -based MOSFET (MOS transistor) and monolithic integrated circuit chip technologies in the late 1950s, leading to the microprocessor and
9052-477: The exact definition of the term "microprocessor", it is largely undisputed that the first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004 , designed and realized by Federico Faggin with his silicon-gate MOS IC technology, along with Ted Hoff , Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel . In the early 1970s, MOS IC technology enabled the integration of more than 10,000 transistors on a single chip. System on
9176-508: The first Colossus. After a functional test in December 1943, Colossus was shipped to Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 18 January 1944 and attacked its first message on 5 February. Colossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable computer. It used a large number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to perform a variety of boolean logical operations on its data, but it
9300-725: The first attested use of computer in the 1640s, meaning 'one who calculates'; this is an "agent noun from compute (v.)". The Online Etymology Dictionary states that the use of the term to mean " 'calculating machine' (of any type) is from 1897." The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the "modern use" of the term, to mean 'programmable digital electronic computer' dates from "1945 under this name; [in a] theoretical [sense] from 1937, as Turing machine ". The name has remained, although modern computers are capable of many higher-level functions. Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers . The earliest counting device
9424-559: The follow-on 1005. The UNIVAC 1005 , an enhanced version of the UNIVAC 1004, was first shipped in February 1966. The machine saw extensive use by the US Army , including the first use of an electronic computer on the battlefield. Additional peripherals were also available including a paper tape reader and a three pocket stacker selectable card read/punch. The machine had a two-stage assembler (SAAL – Single Address Assembly Language) which
9548-405: The following year: this incident is noteworthy because the computer correctly predicted an Eisenhower landslide over Adlai Stevenson , whereas the final Gallup poll had Eisenhower winning the popular vote 51–49 in a close contest. The prediction led CBS 's news boss in New York, Siegfried Mickelson , to believe the computer was in error, and he refused to allow the prediction to be read. Instead,
9672-409: The form of conditional branching and loops , and integrated memory , making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete . The machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his machine had to be made by hand – this was a major problem for a device with thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was dissolved with
9796-472: The general-purpose business market. It came in two versions: the Solid State 80 (IBM-Hollerith 80-column cards) and the Solid State 90 (Remington-Rand 90-column cards). This computer used magnetic logic , not transistors, because the transistors then available had highly variable characteristics and were not sufficiently reliable. Magnetic logic gates were based on magnetic cores with multiple wire windings; unlike vacuum tubes, they were solid-state devices and had
9920-587: The hardware. The affordable System 80 series of small mainframes ran the OS/3 operating system which originated on the Univac 90/30 (and later 90/25, and 90/40). The UNIVAC Series 90 first ran with Univac developed OS/9, which was later replaced by RCA's Virtual Memory Operating System (VMOS). RCA originally called this operating system Time Sharing Operating System (TSOS), running on RCA's Spectra 70 line of virtual memory systems and changed its name to VMOS before
10044-466: The integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working integrated example on 12 September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as "a body of semiconductor material ... wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated". However, Kilby's invention was a hybrid integrated circuit (hybrid IC), rather than
10168-411: The integration. In 1876, Sir William Thomson had already discussed the possible construction of such calculators, but he had been stymied by the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators . In a differential analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to work. Starting in
10292-590: The machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory , so it was not the first completely transistorized computer. That distinction goes to the Harwell CADET of 1955, built by the electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell . The metal–oxide–silicon field-effect transistor (MOSFET), also known as
10416-637: The marine gyrostabilizer and the gyrocompass —at 40 Flatbush Avenue Extension in Downtown Brooklyn . During World War I the company diversified into aircraft components including bomb sights and fire control systems . In their early decades, Sperry Gyroscope and related companies were concentrated on Long Island , New York, especially in Nassau County . Over the years, it diversified to other locations. In 1918, Lawrence Sperry split from his father to compete over aero-instruments with
10540-452: The modern computer was proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper, On Computable Numbers . Turing proposed a simple device that he called "Universal Computing machine" and that is now known as a universal Turing machine . He proved that such a machine is capable of computing anything that is computable by executing instructions (program) stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. The fundamental concept of Turing's design
10664-403: The more famous Sir William Thomson. The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer , built by H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MIT starting in 1927. This built on the mechanical integrators of James Thomson and the torque amplifiers invented by H. W. Nieman. A dozen of these devices were built before their obsolescence became obvious. By the 1950s,
10788-429: The new PET film tapes, and some circuits that were transistorized (although it was still a vacuum-tube computer ). It was fully compatible with existing UNIVAC I programs for both code and data. The UNIVAC II also added some instructions to the UNIVAC I's instruction set. The UNIVAC Solid State was a 2-address, decimal computer, with memory on a rotating drum with 5,000 signed 10-digit words, aimed at
10912-661: The new company. Harry Franklin Vickers , then the President of Sperry Corporation, continued as president and CEO of Sperry Rand. The UNIVAC division of Remington Rand was renamed the Remington Rand Univac division of Sperry Rand. William Norris was put in charge as Vice-President and General Manager reporting to the President of the Remington Rand Division (of Sperry Rand). The following is
11036-556: The newly formed Sperry Corporation . The new corporation was a holding company for a number of smaller entities such as the original Sperry Gyroscope, Ford Instrument Company , Intercontinental Aviation, Inc. , and others. The company made advanced aircraft navigation equipment for the market, including the Sperry Gyroscope and the Sperry Radio Direction Finder. It also moved into the hydraulics industry when it acquired Vickers, Inc. in 1937. Sperry supported
11160-563: The on-air announcer, announced that they had failed to believe the earlier prediction. The United States Army requested a UNIVAC computer from Congress in 1951. Colonel Wade Heavey explained to the Senate subcommittee that the national mobilization planning involved multiple industries and agencies: "This is a tremendous calculating process...there are equations that can not be solved by hand or by electrically operated computing machines because they involve millions of relationships that would take
11284-460: The original 9200 vs 32K for the other variants) implemented the same 16-bit modified subset of the 360 architecture as the Model 20 , while the UNIVAC 9400 implemented a subset of the full 360 instruction set. This did not violate IBM patents or copyrights; Sperry gained the right to "clone" the 360 as settlement of a lawsuit concerning IBM's infringement of Remington Rand's core memory patents. The 9400
11408-690: The original Sperry Gyroscope building in Lake Success) performed work on a number of US government defense contracts. Sperry also managed the operation from 1961 to 1975 of the large Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant near Minden . In January 1972, Sperry took over the RCA Spectra 70 line of electronic digital computers (architectural cousins to the IBM System/360 ). In 1983, Sperry sold Vickers to Libbey Owens Ford (later to be renamed TRINOVA Corporation and subsequently Aeroquip-Vickers). At
11532-486: The practical use of MOS transistors as memory cell storage elements, leading to the development of MOS semiconductor memory , which replaced earlier magnetic-core memory in computers. The MOSFET led to the microcomputer revolution , and became the driving force behind the computer revolution . The MOSFET is the most widely used transistor in computers, and is the fundamental building block of digital electronics . The next great advance in computing power came with
11656-548: The results of operations to be saved and retrieved. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary , the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait : "I haue [ sic ] read the truest computer of Times, and
11780-591: The same time that digital calculation replaced analog. The engineer Tommy Flowers , working at the Post Office Research Station in London in the 1930s, began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange . Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation five years later, converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system, using thousands of vacuum tubes . In
11904-694: The same time, it acquired the Aircraft Radio Corporation from Cessna . On September 16, 1986, after the success of a second hostile takeover bid engineered by Burroughs Corporation CEO and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury , Michael Blumenthal , Sperry Corporation merged with Burroughs Corporation. The newly merged company was renamed Unisys Corporation — a portmanteau of "united", "information", and "systems," while also referencing Sperry's well-known previous UNIVAC computer branding. The takeover came about even after Sperry used
12028-490: The stored-program computer was laid out by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory and began work on developing an electronic stored-program digital computer. His 1945 report "Proposed Electronic Calculator" was the first specification for such a device. John von Neumann at the University of Pennsylvania also circulated his First Draft of a Report on
12152-711: The subsequent 1108 was considerably more successful, and helped to establish the series as viable competitors to the IBM System/360 . The series continues to be supported today by Unisys Corporation as the ClearPath Forward Dorado Series. The UNIVAC 9000 series (9200, 9300, 9400, 9700) was introduced in the mid-1960s to compete with the low end of the IBM 360 series. The 9200 and 9300, which differed in CPU speed and maximum memory capacity (16K for
12276-443: The success of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but analog computers remained in use during the 1950s in some specialized applications such as education ( slide rule ) and aircraft ( control systems ). Claude Shannon 's 1937 master's thesis laid the foundations of digital computing, with his insight of applying Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits being
12400-443: The system was usually shipped with UNIVAC FH880 or UNIVAC FH432 or FH1782 magnetic drum storage. Basic operating system was OMEGA (successor to REX for the 490) although custom operating systems were also used (e.g. CONTORTS for airline reservations). The UNIVAC 1050 was an internally programmed computer with up to 32K of six-bit character memory, which was introduced in 1963. It was a one-address machine with 30-bit instructions, had
12524-484: The task from their Solid State 80 mainframe, which produced the tapes. A design for an "Emulator" board was available that would allow the plugboard 1004 to run programs read from card decks. The board was made by the customers, not by UNIVAC. However, the Emulator made heavy use of the 1004's program-branching reed relays, called selectors, which caused increased failures, later solved by the use of electronic selectors in
12648-414: The temporary United Nations headquarters from 1946 to 1952)—into the 1980s. In 1955, Sperry acquired Remington Rand and renamed itself Sperry Rand . Acquiring then- Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and Engineering Research Associates along with Remington Rand, the company developed the successful UNIVAC computer series and signed a valuable cross-licensing deal with IBM . The company remained
12772-563: The unrelated divisions were sold. The company dropped the Rand from its title and reverted to Sperry Corporation. In 1981/82 the distinct Sperry UNIVAC branding was dropped and the division was renamed as the Sperry Computer Systems Division. In 1986, Sperry Corporation merged with Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys . After the 1986 merger of Burroughs and Sperry, Unisys evolved from a computer manufacturer to
12896-412: The versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers. The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine , invented by Sir William Thomson (later to become Lord Kelvin) in 1872. The differential analyser , a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson , the elder brother of
13020-536: The work of a group of Stanford University inventors, led by Russell and Sigurd Varian , who had invented the klystron , and incorporated this technology and related inventions into their products. The company prospered during World War II as military demand skyrocketed, ranking 19th among US corporations in the value of wartime production contracts. It specialized in high technology devices such as analog computer –controlled bomb sights, airborne radar systems, and automated take-off and landing systems. Sperry also
13144-406: Was a 16-transistor chip built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962. General Microelectronics later introduced the first commercial MOS IC in 1964, developed by Robert Norman. Following the development of the self-aligned gate (silicon-gate) MOS transistor by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs in 1967, the first silicon-gate MOS IC with self-aligned gates
13268-472: Was a 30-bit word core memory machine with 16K or 32K words; 4.8 microsecond cycle time. The UNIVAC 1232 was a military version of the 490. The UNIVAC 492 is similar to the UNIVAC 490 , but with extended memory to 64K 30-bit words. The UNIVAC 494 was a 30-bit word machine and successor to the UNIVAC 490/492 with faster CPU and 131K (later 262K) core memory. Up to 24 I/O channels were available and
13392-625: Was an early example. Later portables such as the Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable were considerably lighter but still needed to be plugged in. The first laptops, such as the Grid Compass , removed this requirement by incorporating batteries – and with the continued miniaturization of computing resources and advancements in portable battery life, portable computers grew in popularity in the 2000s. The same developments allowed manufacturers to integrate computing resources into cellular mobile phones by
13516-632: Was based on the ERA ;1101 and those models built at ERA were rebadged as UNIVAC 110x; despite the 1100 model numbers, they were not related to the latter 1100/2200 series. The 1103A is credited in the literature as the first computer to have interrupts. The original model range was the UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I), the second commercial computer made in the United States. The main memory consisted of tanks of liquid mercury implementing delay-line memory , arranged in 1,000 words of 12 alphanumeric characters each. The first machine
13640-537: Was built with 2000 relays , implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz . Program code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating-point numbers . Rather than the harder-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage 's earlier design), using
13764-434: Was delivered on 31 March 1951. The Remington Rand 409 was a control panel programmed punched card calculator, designed in 1949, and sold in two models: the UNIVAC 60 (1952) and the UNIVAC 120 (1953). The UNIVAC File Computer was first shipped in 1956. It was equipped with between one and ten large drums each holding 180,000 Alphanumeric characters. One early application was for an airline reservations system , which
13888-455: Was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951. At least seven of these later machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, one of them to Shell labs in Amsterdam . In October 1947 the directors of British catering company J. Lyons & Company decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of computers. Lyons's LEO I computer, modelled closely on
14012-443: Was developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968. The MOSFET has since become the most critical device component in modern ICs. The development of the MOS integrated circuit led to the invention of the microprocessor , and heralded an explosion in the commercial and personal use of computers. While the subject of exactly which device was the first microprocessor is contentious, partly due to lack of agreement on
14136-825: Was developed in the late 16th century and found application in gunnery, surveying and navigation. The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over it with a mechanical linkage. The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, by the English clergyman William Oughtred , shortly after the publication of the concept of the logarithm . It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development progressed, added scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, as well as transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions . Slide rules with special scales are still used for quick performance of routine calculations, such as
14260-449: Was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan , Persia in 1235. Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe, an early fixed- wired knowledge processing machine with a gear train and gear-wheels, c. 1000 AD . The sector , a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, trigonometry , multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as squares and cube roots,
14384-458: Was its primary assembler; it also had a three-stage card based compiler for a programming language called SARGE. 1005s were used as some nodes on Autodin . There were actually two versions of the 1005. The Federal Systems (military) version described above and a Commercial Systems version for civilian use. While the two versions shared common memory and peripherals they had two completely different instruction sets. The Commercial Systems version had
14508-477: Was made of germanium . Noyce's monolithic IC was fabricated using the planar process , developed by his colleague Jean Hoerni in early 1959. In turn, the planar process was based on Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick work on semiconductor surface passivation by silicon dioxide. Modern monolithic ICs are predominantly MOS ( metal–oxide–semiconductor ) integrated circuits, built from MOSFETs (MOS transistors). The earliest experimental MOS IC to be fabricated
14632-643: Was most likely a form of tally stick . Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented counts of items, likely livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay containers. The use of counting rods is one example. The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from devices used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BCE. Since then, many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented. In
14756-434: Was not Turing-complete. Nine Mk II Colossi were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total). Colossus Mark I contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Mark II with 2,400 valves, was both five times faster and simpler to operate than Mark I, greatly speeding the decoding process. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first electronic programmable computer built in
14880-736: Was not a success. The last UNIVAC-badged computer was produced in 1986. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly built the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania 's Moore School of Electrical Engineering between 1943 and 1946. A 1946 patent rights dispute with the university led Eckert and Mauchly to depart the Moore School to form the Electronic Control Company, later renamed Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . That company first built
15004-482: Was roughly equivalent to the IBM 360/30. The 9000 series used plated-wire memory , which functioned somewhat like core memory but used a non-destructive read. Since the 9000 series was intended as direct competitors to IBM, they used 80-column cards and EBCDIC character encoding. Memory capacity started as low as 8K byte primary storage for a batch-configured system. Optionally a disk drive subsystem could be added, with 8414 5 MB disk drives as well as tape drives, using
15128-496: Was sold to typewriter, office machine, electric razor, and gun maker Remington Rand on February 15, 1950. Eckert and Mauchly now reported to Leslie Groves , the retired army general who had previously managed building The Pentagon and led the Manhattan Project . The most famous UNIVAC product was the UNIVAC I mainframe computer of 1951, which became known for predicting the outcome of the U.S. presidential election
15252-877: Was the creator of the Ball Turret Gun mounted under the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and the Consolidated B-24 Liberator , as commemorated by the film Memphis Belle and the poem The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner . In 1944, Sperry sold the Brooklyn factory at 40 Flatbush Avenue Extension to the Howard clothing manufacturing company, which already had a smaller nearby factory. Postwar, Sperry expanded its interests in electronics and computing, producing
15376-523: Was used by Eastern Air Lines . It competed mainly against the IBM 650 and the IBM 305 RAMAC and a total of 130 were manufactured. The UNIVAC II was an improvement to the UNIVAC ;I that UNIVAC first delivered in 1958. The improvements included magnetic (non-mercury) core memory of 2,000 to 10,000 words, UNISERVO II tape drives, which could use either the old UNIVAC I metal tapes or
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