World War 2° provided new demands for information processing in the 1940s. As a prelude, Howard G. Aiken of Harvard, working in conjunction with IBM, unveiled an electromechanical calculator in 1944, called the MARK 1°. Aiken's machine used mechanical relays stimulated by electricity to perform basic operations. It was 51 feet long and contained 500 miles of wire!
In England the war brought the need to break German military codes faster than could be done manually. The end of 1943 marked the initial operation of the Colossus, the world's first working electronic computer. It could decode messages 12 times faster than any previous machine.
At the same time, the U.S. government signed a contract with the University of Pennsylvania to develop an electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), designed by J. Presper Eckert and John W.Mauchley, was completed in 1946. The ENIAC contained 19.000 vacuum tubes, 70.000 resistors, and 5 million soldered joints. Computers and associated equipment became known as "hardware". ENIAC was able to perform 5000 additions, 357 multiplications, and 38divisions in a whole second. This was a thousand times faster its predecessors. However, it used so much power that it caused the lights to dim in one section of Philadelphia.
Unlike the Colossus, the MARK 1° and ENIAC were general-purpose computers because they were able to perform a wide variety of jobs very quickly. The first programmers for the two computers were women.
Grace Hopper of the U.S. Navy programmed the MARK 1°, Adele Goldsteid programmed the ENIAC. They were both talented mathematicians.
Although Mauchley and Eckert are often given credit for building the first electronic computer, ENIAC was actually based in part on the work of John V.Atanasoff. Atanasoff was a processor at lowa State University. By 1939 he had developed many ideas for an all-electronic computer. In 1942 he and graduate student, Clifford Berry, completed an electronic computer that could solve linear equations. Unfortunatelu, he lost funding for further research and his work was not recogenized until 1973.
One of ENIAC's greatest feats was in showing the potential of what could be done.
The next breakthrough was a general-purpose computer that could be easily programmed. This goal was achieved through the efforts of John von Neumann who joined the Eckert-Mauchley team in the mid-40s.
von Neumann's design included a memory unit that temporarily stored a program and data. His stored-program principles became the foundation for computer design for the next 30 years.
EDVAC and UNIVAC were the first computers for commercial purposes. UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) tabulated the 1950 census. The second UNIVAC system was delivered to the General Electric Company in 1952. This lauched the use of computers in business.
The computers manufacture unitil the early 1950s were known as "first generation" computers.
The programms, called "software", that operated them were written in machine language. Coding in machine language required extensive technical knowledge. Programmers found it difficult to use and prone to error.
Early computers could run one program at a time. Most of data storage. Additionally, they relied on vacuum tubes as their primary processiong components. Because of the number and size of vacuum tubes, these computers were expensive to run, and often failed.


Exercises
Read the first part of the text quickly and say whether the following statements are True or False. Correct the false ones.

1. The MARK 1° was IBM's first electronic computer.
2. England's first computer was called "Colossus".
3. The first patent for a general-purpose electronic computer was awarded to Maucheley and Eckert.
4. The ENIAC used so much power that it caused the lights to dim in Philadelphia.
5. Atanasoff invented an electronic digital computer in 1942, but his work was only reconized many years later.
6. The programs for the MARK 1° were written by two women mathematicians.
7. Von Neumann's ideas of storing programs and data in a memory unit became foundation for computer design.
8. The first public use of electronic computers was to analyse the 1940 census.
9. The first successful computer for private use was the UNIVAC.
10. First-generation computers used vacuum tubes and software written in assembly lenguage.

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