first generation computer
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Question
first generation computer
Answer
A vacuum tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry. Although superseded by second generation, transistorized computers, vacuum tube computers continued to be built into the 1960s. These computers were mostly one-of-a-kind designs.
Explanation:
In the United States, government funding went to a project led by John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and their colleagues at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania; their objective was an all-electronic computer. Under contract to the army and under the direction of Herman Goldstine, work began in early 1943 on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). The next year, mathematician John von Neumann, already on full-time leave from the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), Princeton, New Jersey, for various government research projects (including the Manhattan Project), began frequent consultations with the group.
ENIAC was something less than the dream of a universal computer. Designed for the specific purpose of computing values for artillery range tables, it lacked some features that would have made it a more generally useful machine. Like Colossus but unlike Howard Aiken’s machine (described in the section Early experiments), it used plugboards for communicating instructions to the machine; this had the advantage that, once the instructions were thus “programmed,” the machine ran at electronic speed. Instructions read from a card reader or other slow mechanical device would not have been able to keep up with the all-electronic ENIAC. The disadvantage was that it took days to rewire the machine for each new problem. This was such a liability that only with some generosity could it be called programmable.