In 1945 the U.S. government built ENIAC, an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, to do ballistics trajectory calculations for the

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2024-12-02 16:00:05

In 1945 the U.S. government built ENIAC, an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, to do ballistics trajectory calculations for the military; World War 2 was nearing its conclusion, however, so ENIAC’s first major job was to do calculations that undergirded the development of the hydrogen bomb. Six years later, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who led the development of ENIAC, launched UNIVAC, the Universal Automatic Computer, for broader government and commercial applications. Early use cases included calculating the U.S. census and assisting with calculation-intensive back office operations like payroll and bookkeeping.

These were hardly computers as we know them today, but rather calculation machines that took in reams of data (via punch cards or magnetic tape) and returned results according to hardwired calculation routines; the “operating system” were the humans actually inputting the data, scheduling jobs, and giving explicit hardware instructions. Originally this instruction also happened via punch cards and magnetic tape, but later models added consoles to both provide status and also allow for register-level control; these consoles evolved into terminals, but the first versions of these terminals, like the one that was available for the original version of the IBM System/360, were used to initiate batch programs.

Any recounting of computing history usually focuses on the bottom two levels of that stack — the device and the input method — because they tend to evolve in parallel. For example, here are the three major computing paradigms to date: