History Culminating Task

Overview More 1910-1919 (WW1) 1920-1929 (Cars) 1930-1939 (Helecopters) 1940-1949 (Computers)

1940-1949 (Computers)

In 1940, David Packard and Bill Hewlett found their company in a Palo Alto, California garage. [5] Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator which rapidly became popular for engineers. [5] In 1942, the Z3 was built by German Engineer Konrad Zuse who was working in isolation. [5] It uses 2,300 relays, preforms floating point binary arithmetic, and has a 22-bit word length. [5] The Z3 was used for aerodynamic calculations but was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943. [5] Konrad Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of it in the 1960s and is currently on display at Deutsches Museum in Munich. [5] In 1943, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer is completed. In a result, Atanasoff was declared the originator of many basic computer ideas, however, the computer as a concept was declared unpatentable and so it was freely open to all. [5] A replica is currently on display at the Computer History Museum. [5] In 1949, the first computer program ran on a computer, the Manchester “Baby”. [5] It was built to test a new memory technology which was developed by Williams and Killburn. [5] It was the first high-speed electronic RAM for computers. [5] The program consisted of 17 instructions which was written by Kilburn.