English For Engineering : Assignment

Currently, computers are used for everything in life. For example, from researching for a large essay project to playing video games with friends. “From the outset, computers were weighed for both military and commercial significance, and hence they straddled the very institutional boundaries that central to this study. It is also significant that computers became valuable research instruments in nearly all disciplines.” (Akera, 2). The first digital computer was constructed in 1946 by John Mauchly, a professor, and Presper Eckert, an inventor. “They met by chance in 1941 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering. They soon developed a revolutionary vision: to use electricity as a means of computing--in other words, to make electricity "think."” (McCartney, 1). They were ignored by their colleagues, but in 1943 they were becoming more well known and was funded by the U.S Army. The U.S Army was seeking for a contraption that can quickly calculate ballistic missile trajectories in wartime Europe and Africa (McCartney, 1). John Mauchly and Presper Eckert led a team that constructed the computer that occupied 1,800 square feet and weighed thirty tons. They named the large computer, ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. The process of building this machine was not an effortless task, Mauchly and Presper and their team had to overcome many problems

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There have been many advances since the initial invention of the computer fifty years ago. Today, computers operate many of the things that we use in everyday life. Some examples of these things are farm machinery, cars, planes, video games, heat and water delivery to our homes, banking, billing, and even the stock market. The advances of the computer have resulted in the

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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

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The origin of the computer resides with the military. The computer itself was created by the military during the Cold War era, when we were in a technological race with Russia. This race was the fuel for massive advancements in technology especially in the sector of computer intelligence. The first Computer’s were physically large enough to fill an entire room. They were used to manage large quantities of data in textual and numerical form. The government backed certain research facilities in the advancement of the computer and some investigated and experimented in computer technology with art and music. 1

The well-known theory of the Berlin aesthetic theorist Friedrich Kittler was necessary for the development of the computer. The first computer was called “Colossus” and was used for military purposes. Another technological invention was the “ATM” and it was set out during the 1960’s but invented in the 1940’s. The computer when it was originally invented was used for deciphering Nazi enigma codes to try and figure out what the codes were trying to get out to the other Nazis. The computer worked very well with the enigma codes and it was one of the reasons that we won the war; the fact that we could basically listen in on the Nazi’s communications. The maker of the computer, Konrad Zuse, had intended the computer to be made for civilian use at first, but then the first computer ended up being used for the military

The first generation of electronic computers was characterized by hulking monstrosities of tubes and wires, housed in metal. The first programmable electronic computer was Colossus. Completed in 1943, Colossus contained

Computer science is, in comparison to most sciences, a relatively new field starting as early as the 1930’s for military based projects and eventually adapting in the early 1980’s to the personal computers we have today. If we were to look into a “brief history of computers starting with the 1950’s we would see huge series of cathode tubes and switches taking up entire rooms. These computers were designed for military intelligence and predominantly comprised of computing long calculations run by paper punch cards and manual switches.” (Ceruzzi pg. 28)

The first ever computer was invented in the 1820s by Charlse Babbage. However the first electronic digital computer were developed between 1940 and 1945 in the United States and in the United Kingdom. They were gigantic, originally the size of a large room, and also need to be supply a large amount of power source which is equivalent as several hundred modern personal computers. The history of computer hardware covers the developments from simple devices to aid calculation, to mechanical calculators, punched card data processing and on to modern stored program computers. The tools or mechanical tool used to help in calculation are called calculators while the machine operator that help in calculations is called computer. At first the

The author, Wilkes, of this journal article reviews and criticizes Charles Babbage and his engines. The title of the journal questions the current position Charles Babbage is known for, the father of computing. Wilkes considers Babbage a “great uncle” of computing science instead of the father and gives further details as in to why. The author doesn’t only criticize Babbage’s work but also informs the readers on how they operate and what their function is.