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Born: 9 March 1900 in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA
Died: 14 March 1973 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
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Born: 9 Dec 1906 in New York, USA
Died: 1 Jan 1992 in Arlington, Virginia, USA
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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, 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.
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 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.
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, 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.
Hopper was the first computer science "Man of the Year" in 1969.
In 1991, Hopper received the National Medal of Technology. |
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.
