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The 1940's: An Iconic Era Of American Society

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Computers have evolved to become backbone of the American society. As a result, the development of the first computer should be considered an iconic era of American history. History, present and future, including the military. The 1940’s was the beginning of an era of computers ruling us. It all started with Konrad Zuse a German engineer creates and finishes the computer called Z3 built in 1941 it was built using 2,300 relays, and used a floating point binary arithmetic, and had a 22 bit word length. Although the original was destroyed in a bombing run in Berlin in late 1943. He supervised a reconstruction of his invention in the 60's which is on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. In February of 1946 the ENIAC was released and the public was able to view it, built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert they improved it by 1,000 times since the first computers were released. Started in 1943 it took 3 years to complete and it used a plugboard and switch program, and the speed was about 5,000 operations per second. It took up 1,000 square feet, or the size of a small house! In 1944 the Harvard Mark-1 was completed. Thought by the Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and built by IBM, the dimensions of this beast was room sized, relay-based calculator. Also it had a …show more content…

In 1968 the 6600 lost its title of the fastest computer in the world when the CDC 7600 was made. The way the 6600 worked was by having 10 computers process stuff or known as the peripheral processors, which funnel data to a central cpu. The Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hired the University of Illinois to build a processing computer and its name would be the ILLIAC IV, which did not operate until 1972 at NASA's Arms Research. This computer was the first large-scale array, and it had the speed of 200 million instructions per

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