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By some
definitions, computing devices go back to the period of early cave men when
stones were piled together as a means of counting. The earliest computers include:
Early Time
1642 Blaise Pascal - built the first automatic calculator. His machine,
the Pascaline, was based on interlocking cogs and gears. He built 50
for sale, but clerks and accountants refused to use them for fear it
would do away with their jobs!
Early Computers
1939 ABC - the first digital computer. It was designed by Dr. John
Astanasoff.
1945 First "bug" - During development of the Mark II, a relay inside a
computer failed and researchers found a moth beaten to death inside
its contacts. This is thought to be the origin of the terms bug and
debugging.
1946 ENIAC - a room sized computer with 18,000 vacuum tubes.
Vacuum tubes produce a lot of heat. This system could now heat New
York City.
1945 John Von Neuman - developed the stored program concept. His
idea was to store not only the data to be processed in computer
memory, but also the instructions used to process the data. This idea is
considered to be among the most important in all of science.
The Computer Age officially began on June 14, 1951 when the first
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the United
States Census Bureau. This device, developed by the Eckert-Mauchly
Computer Corp., was the first commercially available computer. The
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp was organized in 1947 and sold to
Remington-Rand shortly thereafter. On November 4, 1952, UNIVAC
predicted that Dwight D. Eisenhower would defeat Adlai E. Stevenson
in the presidential election after analyzing only five percent of the
tallied vote.
The first major computer system in North Carolina was the UNIVAC
1105, manufactured by Remington-Rand, located at the University of
North Carolina Computation Center in 1959. It cost $2,450,000
($43,000 per month) in rental. Containing 7200 vacuum tubes, it
required 3100 square feet of floor space and 35 tons of cooling. The
memory capacity was approximately 54000 bytes along with
approximately 144,000 bytes of mass storage. Simple addition
operations could be performed in 44 microseconds.