Hahn

In 1946, J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchley developed the first high-speed electronic digital computer, the ENIAC. It filled a 30-by-50 foot room and weighed 30 tons. It had 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 5 million soldered joints. Information was fed to it by turning a series of dials until they corresponded to the correct digits. The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in separate units that were plugged together to form a route for the flow of information, and had to be redone after each computation.. The following year, Eckert and Mauchley built the EDVAC, the first computer with electronically-stored programs. Following the invention of the transistor in 1947, transistors replaced vacuum tubes, and by 1956, there was á second generation of smaller, faster, more reliable, and more energy-efficient computers. Integrated circuits were invented in 1958. By the 1960’s, programming languages had been developed, and the creation of the “stored program concept” meant that instructions to run a computer for a specific function (known as a program) were stored in the computer’s memory, where they could be quickly replaced by a…