Despite the boom of the technology industry decades ago, as companies like Microsoft and Apple became the most valuable in the world on numerous occasions, the history of the sector dates back over a century. Therefore, sometimes we come across very curious stories, such as the discovery of a computer worth 80,000 euros in a lost attic of a house in the United Kingdom.
However, this time we are celebrating, as one of the first general purpose computers turned 80 years old just a few weeks ago. As the TechSpot portal indicates in a recent publication, the Harvard Mark I was officially presented on August 7, 1944. Developed by physicist Howard Aiken in collaboration with IBM, it became the first programmable PC built in the United States. Thus, thanks to military funding, IBM began building the prototype in the early 1940s and completed assembly in February 1944.
Capable of performing three additions or subtractions per second
As a pioneer, the IBM team had 60 sets of 24 switches which could store up to 72 numbers of 23 digits each. Thus, it was able to carry out up to three additions or subtractions per second, a number that changed for multiplications and divisions: for the former operations, the team needed about six seconds; for the latter, it took up to 15 seconds to find the solution.
Therefore, institutions like the Navy used this machine to carry out military operations such as designing torpedoes or underwater detection systems. In addition, the Harvard Mark I was used in the Manhattan Project for calculations related to the implosion device of the atomic bomb. Furthermore, the system was able to use standard IBM punched cards and typed numbers to encode the mathematical problems that the computer had to solve. After 15 years, in 1959 they decided to retire the computer from active service and it became an exhibit in the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. And, as a final curiosity, it served as a foundation for later models that led to the Mark IV.
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