Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
15 The Manchester Mk 1, June 1949, the first fully electronic stored-program
computer in operation, built by Professor Max Newman at Manchester University.
simply with calculation but rather with the manipulation of
symbols. In this it anticipated much of how computing would later
develop, which would not necessarily have been obvious at the time.
In the United States the impetus to develop digital calculating
machines derived from a different set of requirements. The need to
generate the unprecedented numbers of ballistic tables, describing
the angles at which artillery needed to be fired in different con-
ditions, gave new impetus to pre-war computer projects, and in
doing so led to the construction of one of the first modern comput-
ers. Before the War such tables were generated by hand. Almost
immediately it was finished in
1944
, the Harvard Mark I was enlisted
for the war effort to calculate ballistic tables. Similar uses were
made of Bush's Differential Analyser, and Stibitz's Complex Number
Calculator technology, by then incorporated in a series of machines
built at Bell Labs, known as the Bell Relay Machines. Later in the
War similar machines were used in the Manhattan Project for the
unprecedentedly complex calculations involved in the building of
the atomic bomb. The twin demands of ballistic tables in the War
and the Manhattan Project for building the Atom Bomb led to the
building of another candidate for the title of the first modern
computer. By
1943
it became evident that the production of ballistic
