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Mathematician and physicist John Atanasoff, looking for ways to solve equations automatically, took a drive to clear his thoughts in 1937. At a Mississippi River roadhouse he jotted on a napkin the basic features of an electronic computing machine. Atanasoff’s linear equation-solver, built with graduate student Clifford Berry, could solve a variety of problems but was not programmable.
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The RAND Corporation’s JOHNNIAC was based on the stored-program computer developed at Princeton’s IAS—and named for John von Neumann, godfather of the IAS project. Used for scientific and engineering calculations, the JOHNNIAC was completed in 1954, though it was repeatedly expanded and improved throughout its 13-year lifespan.
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The computer was operational by 1951, and the IAS made its design freely available. This “open source hardware” begat similar machines around the world, as well as a host of variations on the IAS theme.
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Impatient waiting for a commercial successor to ENIAC, the U.S. National Bureau of Standards opted in 1948 to create its own electronic computer. The SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) became the world’s fastest computer when completed in 1950, a year before Princeton’s IAS machine.
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After his wartime triumphs in code-breaking, Alan Turing joined Britain’s National Physical Laboratory in 1945 to develop electronic computers. Turing created seven designs. Six remained, as intended, just experimental concepts. Design #5 was built in 1950 as Pilot ACE (Automatic Computing Engine), a precursor to the later full-scale ACE.
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The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), developed at Britain’s Cambridge University, ran its first programs in 1949. It became the first stored-program computer in regular use, heralding the transition from test to tool.
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In 1942, physicist John Mauchly proposed an all-electronic calculating machine. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, needed to calculate complex wartime ballistics tables. Proposal met patron.
The result was ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), built between 1943 and 1945
