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Thursday, April 26, 2012

First Generation Computers (1946-1958)

The storage media or memory used in the first generation computer was vacuum tube. Mark-I was developed using vacuum tubes by Howard Aiken in 1937. Mark-I had a length of 51ft, width 3ft and a height of 8ft. It weighed 32 tonnes. 18000 vacuum tubes were used and nearly 7 lakh 50 thousand pats were assmbled in this computer. Nearly 500 miles long wire was cut into pieces to connect different components. This mainframe computer took 4.5 seconds for multiplication operation, and 3 additions were performed in 1 second.
Meanwhile EDVAC, UNIVAC-I, MARK-II, ENIAC, Z-3, Z-4 etc. mainframe computers were manufactured.
Using many vacuum tubes, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was devised by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr. in 1946. This computer was comparatively efficient as it could perform 30 days' work done by any other computer, in one day at that time. From 1947 to 1955, this computer was used in American Offices.

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