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Harvard Mark I Dead

Harvard Mark I
KindMachine
Introduced1944
Discontinued1959
StatusDead
ManufacturerHoward Aiken / IBM
ClassEarly computer
PlatformElectromechanical
Sourcewww.columbia.edu ↗

Aiken's electromechanical giant — 51 feet of shafts and relays, programmed on paper tape, computing for the US Navy through 1959. Grace Hopper cut her teeth on it.

Created by IBM

Aiken's IBM-funded machine — officially the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator — ran from May 1944: 765,000 parts, 530 miles of wire, a 50-foot rotating shaft driving 72 adding counters. It computed for the Navy throughout the war and ran at Harvard until 1959.

Grace Hopper was one of its programmers and wrote its manual; the 'first computer bug' (a moth in a relay, September 1947) was found on its successor, the Mark II.

→ Read the full article on the ALB Wiki

Sources

  1. columbia.edu/acis/history/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I