Grace Hopper
Howard
Aiken
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John Presper Eckert & John W.
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By
Mary
Bellis
Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed
the MARK series of computers at Harvard University. The MARK series of
computers began with the Mark I in 1944. Imagine a giant roomful of noisy,
clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and 8 feet high. The 5-ton device contained
almost 760,000 separate pieces. Used by the US Navy for gunnery and ballistic
calculations, the Mark I was in operation until 1959.
The computer, controlled by pre-punched
paper tape, could carry out addition, subtraction, multiplication, division
and reference to previous results. It had special subroutines for logarithms
and trigonometric functions and used 23 decimal place numbers. Data was
stored and counted mechanically using 3000 decimal storage wheels, 1400
rotary dial switches, and 500 miles of wire. Its electromagnetic relays
classified the machine as a relay computer. All output was displayed on
an electric typewriter. By today's standards, the Mark I was slow, requiring
3-5 seconds for a multiplication operation.
Howard Aiken
Born:
9 March 1900 in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA
Died: 14 March
1973 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
•
Howard
Aiken was an electrical engineer and physicist who first conceived of an
electro-mechanical device like the Mark I in 1937. After completing his
doctorate at Harvard in 1939, Aiken stayed on to continue the computer's
development. IBM funded his research. Aiken headed a team of three engineers
including Grace Hopper.
• The
Mark I reached completion in 1944.
• In
1947, Howard Aiken completed the Mark II, an electronic computer. The same
year he founded the Harvard Computation Laboratory.
• He
later published numerous articles on electronics and switching theory and
started Aiken Industries.
• Howard
Aiken loved computers, but even he had no idea of their eventual widespread
appeal. "Only six electronic digital computers would be required to satisfy
the computing needs of the entire United States," he said in 1947.
Grace Hopper
Born:
9 Dec 1906 in New York, USA
Died: 1 Jan 1992
in Arlington, Virginia, USA
•
Grace
Hopper studied at Vassar College and Yale and then joined the Naval Reserve
in 1943. In 1944, she started working with Aiken on the Harvard Mark I
computer.
• Grace
Hopper is responsible for the term 'bug' for a computer fault. The original
'bug' was a moth, which caused a hardware fault in the Mark I. Hopper was
the first person to 'debug' a computer.
• In
1949, Grace Hopper started research for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation
where she designed an improved compiler and was part of the team which
developed Flow-Matic, the first English-language data processing compiler.
• She
invented the language APT and verified the language COBOL.
• Grace
Hopper was the first computer science "Man of the Year" in 1969.
• In
1991, Grace Hopper received the National Medal of Technology.
Next
Chapter > The
ENIAC 1 Computer
artwork©marybellis
original
photos©"army photos"
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