In the early 1940’s the electronic
computer came into being with the mechanical relays replaced by vacuum tubes.
These were, however, single purpose computer designed to aid in the war effort.
The first general-purpose
electronic computer was ENIAC(Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculation)
that was put into operation at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946-a 30-ton
machine that contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes and performed 100,000
operations per second (100 kilohertz, or KHz) 1000 times slower than today’s
100 megahertz (or MHz) chips.
With the invention of transistors
in 1948, unreliable vacuum tubes that generated an immense amount of heat were
replaced by small transistors that functioned perfectly as switches and
generated little heat.
By 1953 there were only about 100
computers in the entire world. They were huge expensive machines and none but a
few visionaries anticipated that one day machines that were hundreds of times
smaller and homes and offices. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. who built IBM into a
company that dominated the business machine industry world-wide is credited
with contending that there was a world market for less than a dozen computers.
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