On this day in 1944 Harvard University President James Conant wrote to IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. informing him that the Harvard Mark I was operating smoothly. The Mark I was a general purpose electromechanical computer that was developed in cooperation between Conant and Watson for the war effort during the last part of World War II. In his letter, Conant stated that the Mark I was already actively “being used for special problems in connection with the war effort.”
Electro-Mechanical!! Dinosaur in its own time! The ENIAC – that is the great progenitor to modern computers. It was a truly programmable machine with mercury delay line memory and it could be programmed for a huge variety of tasks. What came next was really special … the UNIVAC! While Watson was busy saying that there would be no more than three electronic computers in the world descendants of the ENIAC were correctly predicting history and being featured on TV by Walter Cronkite!
IBM gets way too much credit for early computing! They have done AMAZING things since but it did not start out that way.
The Mark I had 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal digits long.[10] It could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second. A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute.
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The amazing thing is the quantum progress in computing in just 75 years. The average cell phone and tablet blows the Mark 1 away in computing power.
Shades of Star Trek! Maybe a stellar drive is coming soon and we can visit the planet Vulcan. 🙂
A cellphone is light years ahead of the Mark I! Let’s try and imagine the physically smallest system available today that could be assembled – how about a basic Zigbee or Raspberry Pi? Or even something smaller, custom made with maybe a Pic chip for the computing power. Now, go back in time, put it on the floor beside the Mark I and tell those design engineers – that speck on the floor is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Mark I, and, in a pinch, could be powered by putting a few carefully rigged grapefruit in series – imagine their looks of utter disbelief! Now THAT would be fun! Oh, wait – we can’t travel through time … yet 🙂
Dern shame that Howard Akin doesn’t get naming credit for the Mark 1 architecture. Von Neumann gets name credit for the U of Penn Eniac’s shared data/program memory architecture. But Akin’s separate data and instruction address-space concept is named for Harvard University, not for him.
Go figure.
Oh, and yeah. This is the machine where Grace Hopper got her start, and originated programming concepts that persist to this day!
Bravo! Thanks for the pic.
The first large-scale electronic computer was Colossus, at Bletchley Park, in 1943, well ahead of ENIAC. As a code-breaking computer, it could process 5,000 characters per second. The Mark 2 could process 25,000 characters per second, and they were processing both boolean and counting operations. As such, the Colossi were far ahead of the electro-mechanical Mark 1. It’s like comparing the Baird electro-mechanical television system with the Marconi-EMI electronic television system.
By the end of the war, there were nine Colossi at Bletchley Park. After the war, parts of two of them were transferred to the University of Manchester, to help build a peacetime centre for electronic computing. It was not long before Colossus’ successor, the first all-purpose electronic computer, was built in Manchester’s computing laboratory. This new machine – called Baby – was the ancestor of today’s all-purpose computers.