1945-55: Vacuum Tubes and Plugboards
Until World War II, little progress was made in constructing digital
computers. Six significant groups can reasonably claim the first
electrical computers:
- Tommy Flowers and Max Newman, Bletchley Park, England,
- Howard Aitken, Harvard,
- John von Neumann, Institute of Advance Studies, Princeton,
- Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams, Manchester,
- J.P. Eckert and W. Mauchley, University of Pennsylvania, and
- Konran Zuse, Germany.
A single group of people designed, built, programmed, operated and
maintained each machine. Although filling small warehouses, with tens
of thousands of vacuum tubes, they were no match for today's cheapest
home computers.
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943.
Programs were loaded manually using console switches, or more likely by
direct reconfiguration of wiring; indication of a program's execution
and debugging returned through console lights.
Advantages:
- Interactive, and user received immediate response.
Disadvantages:
- Expensive machine was idle most of the time, because people's
reactions (and thinking) were slow.
- Programming and debugging were tedious; hardware was very unreliable.
- Each program was self contained, including its own code for
mathematical functions and I/O device support.
CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 3, p8, 29th July 2024.
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CITS2002