1930 to 1939: The Foundations of Digital Computing - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 41

ern computers. The famous lawsuit between Honeywell and Sperry-Univac will
be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 .
In 1939, work started on yet another computer at the IBM laboratory in En-
dicott, New York. This was called the Harvard Mark 1 computer. The official name
of this device was the “automatic sequence controlled calculator.”
The Mark 1 was designed by the Harvard mathematician Howard Aikin and
other colleagues such as Grace Hopper and several IBM engineers. The design of
the Mark 1 was influenced by the earlier mechanical computing device designed
by Charles Babbage in the 1870s but not completed during his lifetime.
Note
A working Babbage analytical engine was not built until 1991.
Until the successful 1991 construction, there had been debate as to
whether the analytical engine would work or not. But it did work
and was in fact a Turing complete digital computer. After Babbage
in the 1870s, the next Turing complete digital computer would not
occur until the 1950s.
The Mark 1 was an electromechanical device that used relays, storage wheels,
and rotary switches. It could be “programmed” with sequential instructions fed
into the computer via a paper tape. Development of this computer was started in
1939 but not finished until 1944, so the main discussion will be in the next chapter.
Small Mathematical Applications
In this decade, very small mathematical applications were the norm. There were
no true programming languages, very little storage capacity for either instructions
or data, and rather crude input and output devices.
Table 2.1 shows the approximate numbers of worldwide software applications
from 1930 through 1939. These are primarily small experimental “programs” cre-
ated using either a machine language or some form of keyboard entry. As can be
seen, scientific applications dominated during this decade.