And it was this explosion of complexity, bureaucracy, and ultimately data, that drove an increasing need for automation and computation.
One of the largest electro-mechanical computers built was the Harvard Mark I, completed in 1944 by IBM for the Allies during World War 2.
relays: electrically-controlled mechanical switches.
Unfortunately, the mechanical arm inside of a relay *has mass*, and therefore can’t move instantly between opened and closed states. A good relay in the 1940’s might be able to flick back and forth fifty times in a second.
computer bug.
In 1904, English physicist John Ambrose Fleming developed a new electrical component called a thermionic valve, this was the first vacuum tube.
This marked the shift from electro-mechanical computing to electronic computing.
The first large-scale use of 1600 vacuum tubes for computing was the Colossus Mk 1 designed by engineer Tommy Flowers and completed in December of 1943. The Colossus was installed at Bletchley Park, in the UK, and helped to decrypt Nazi communications.
Alan Turing had created an electromechanical device, also at Bletchley Park, called the Bombe. It was an electromechanical machine designed to break Nazi Enigma codes, but the Bombe wasn’t technically a computer.
Colossus is regarded as the first programmable, electronic computer.
ENIAC – completed a few years later in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania.
Designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, this was the world's first truly general purpose, programmable, electronic computer.
ENIAC could perform 5000 ten-digit additions or subtractions per second. ENIAC was generally only operational for about half a day at a time before breaking down.
In 1947, Bell Laboratory scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor, and with it, a whole new era of computing was born!
A transistor is just like a relay or vacuum tube. Typically, transistors have two electrodes separated by a material that sometimes can conduct electricity, and other times resist it – a semiconductor.
IBM 608, released in 1957, the first fully transistor-powered, commercially-available computer. It contained 3000 transistors and could perform 4,500 additions, or roughly 80 multiplications or divisions, every second.
Today, computers use transistors that are smaller than 50 nanometers in size – for reference, a sheet of paper is roughly 100,000 nanometers thick. And they’re not only incredibly small, they’re super fast – they can switch states millions of times per second, and can run for decades.
Even William Shockley moved there, founding Shockley Semiconductor, whose employees later founded Fairchild Semiconductors, whose employees later founded Intel - the world’s largest computer chip maker today.
from relays to vacuum tubes to transistors
