What are the features of mark 1?
Answers
Explanation:
Mark I was enourmous in size, measuring 8 feet high, 51 feet long and three feet deep. It weighed 5 tons, used 530 miles of wire and 730,000 separate parts. The operation of these parts was powered and synchronized by a long horizontal rotating shaft. A four horsepower engine drives the mechanical parts. There were 2200 counter wheels and 3300 relay components. Aiken was greatly concerned with the apperance of the machine, and dispite war time and lack of materials, Mark I was covered with steel and glass. Mark I was a very flexible machine, although it was not that automatical as its original name suggests, while much of its operation had to be set manually.
Mark I was, in modern terms, a parallel synchronous calculator with a word length of 24; 23 decimal digits and one sign. Calculations are performed decimally with fixed decimal point.
The operation unit of the machine consisted of 72 registers called accumulators. Each accumulator held 24 electromagnetical rotary switches, individually connected by a clutch to a drive shaft, by which decimal units, carry, and timing information were stored. This provides for a 23-digit number plus a sign. The accumulators are complete addition and subtraction machines and functions as a storage or memory device. There is no clear separation between storage and arithmetic functions. Some of the accumulators are dedicated to a special function, such as accumulator 70 that deals with the absolute value of a quantity, accumulator 70 that can increase the data amount to be stored (on expense on accurancy), or accumulator 72 that is the automatic check counter.