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Computers. How Far They Have Come
What will they become 5, 10, 50 years from now?
The United States' first programmable computer came into use in 1944. It was designed by Howard Aiken and was built by IBM. It was then donated to the Harvard University for war service.
It was a monster of a machine by any standard weighing in at 5 tons. It was 51 feet long, 8 feet tall and 3 feet wide. Its interior was comprised of 765,000 electromechanical switches and 530 miles of wiring and differed from all other early computers in that it was all-purpose and could be programmed to simulate just about any machine of the time such as a submarine, a tank, a plane or a rocket. It could handle many different tasks including linear algebra, harmonic analysis, statistics, and equations. And, it was very fast for its time.
The operators claimed it could add 3 numbers every second and do long division once every 14.7 seconds. If compared to an Apple I-Phone however, it is like comparing writing with a piece of chalk on a slate to the latest laptop computer. An I-Phone’s weight is around 130 grams and can carry out 35 billion additions per second.
