"BRLESC The BRLESC I (Ballistic Research Laboratories Electronic Scientific Computer) was a first-generation electronic computer built by the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground with assistance from the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and was designed to take over the computational workload of EDVAC and ORDVAC, which themselves were successors of ENIAC. It began operation in 1962. The Ballistic Research Laboratory became a part of the US Army Research Laboratory in 1992. BRLESC was designed primarily for scientific and military tasks requiring high precision and high computational speed,"
"accepted a teaching position at the Moore School, which was a center for wartime computing. Eckert encouraged Mauchly to believe that vacuum tubes could be made reliable with proper engineering practices. The critical problem that was consuming the Moore School was ballistics: the calculation of firing tables for the large number of new guns that the U.S. Army was developing for the war effort. In 1942 Mauchly wrote a memo proposing the building of a general-purpose electronic computer. The proposal, which circulated within the Moore School (but the significance of which was not immediately recognized), emphasized the enormous speed advantage"
"research hub for defense-related engineering projects including radar jamming, night vision, aerial photography, sonar, explosives, napalm, and atomic bomb research. One notable project from this era was the Harvard Mark I computer; one of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on 29 March 1944 by John von Neumann, who worked on the Manhattan Project at the time, and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical tables, which had been the initial goal of"
"ballistics tables. In the summer of 1946 Hartree made his second trip to ENIAC as an evaluation of its applicability to a broad range of science, when he became the first civilian to program it. For this he selected a problem involving the flow of a compressible fluid over a surface, such as air over the surface of a wing travelling faster than the speed of sound. At the end of 1945 or very early in 1946 Hartree briefed Maurice Wilkes of the University of Cambridge on the developments in computing in the USA which he had seen. Wilkes, then"
"Harvard Mark I The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), called Mark I by Harvard University’s staff, was a general purpose electromechanical computer that was used in the war effort during the last part of World War II. One of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on 29 March 1944 by John von Neumann. At that time, von Neumann was working on the Manhattan project, and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical"
"the fall of 1956. FLAC computations supported the flight tests of early ballistic missiles and air-breathing cruise missiles such as the Redstone, Juno, Snark, Matador, Bomarc, Navaho, Atlas, and Thor. Design on the computer was begun in December 1950 at PAFB's Atlantic Missile Range. The Air Force Civilian engineering team assembled to design and build the computer consisted of seven key members: Thomas G. Holmes, Charlie West, John MacNeill, Jim Bellinger, Steve Batchelor, Bruce Smith and Harlan Manweiler. Thomas G. Holmes was responsible for the overall logical design of the computer, ensuring all of the components worked together. He determined"
"Analytical Engine The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a mechanical computer. The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. In other words, the logical structure of the Analytical Engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in"
"ATHENA computer The UNIVAC Athena computer was the processor for ground commands to the HGM-25A Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) as part of Western Electric's missile guidance system. The Athena was the ""first transistorized digital computer to be produced in numbers."" Athena, consisting of ten cabinets plus console on a 13.5 by 20 foot (4.1 by 6 m) floor plan, computed Titan flight data to the necessary burn-out point to start a ballistic trajectory toward the target. On-board Titan attitude control rolled the missile to maintain the missile antenna aligned to the ground antenna. Computer outputs were transmitted to"
"working programmable, fully automatic computer, with binary digital arithmetic logic, but it lacked the conditional branching of a Turing machine. On 12 May 1941, it was successfully presented to an audience of scientists of the ""Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt"" (""German Laboratory for Aviation"") in Berlin. The Z3 stored its program on an external tape, but it was electromechanical rather than electronic. The Colossus of 1943 was the first electronic computing device, but it was not a general-purpose machine. The ENIAC (1946) was the first machine that was both electronic and general purpose. It was Turing complete, with conditional branching, and"
"the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in August 1949, but due to a number of problems, the computer only began operation in 1951, and then only on a limited basis. The first commercial computer was the Ferranti Mark 1, built by Ferranti and delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951. It was based on the Manchester Mark 1. The main improvements over the Manchester Mark 1 were in the size of the primary storage (using random access Williams tubes), secondary storage (using a magnetic drum), a faster multiplier, and additional instructions. The basic"
"Colossus computer Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program. Colossus was designed by research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis (see"
"the University of Pennsylvania during the early 1940s. The latter was used extensively in the computation of artillery firing tables prior to the invention of the ENIAC, which, in many ways, was modelled on the differential analyser. Also in the early 1940s, with Samuel H. Caldwell, one of the initial contributors during the early 1930s, Bush attempted an electrical, rather than mechanical, variation, but the digital computer built elsewhere had much greater promise and the project ceased. In 1947, UCLA installed a differential analyser built for them by General Electric at a cost of $125,000. By 1950, this machine had"
"firing tables were used in battle to find the appropriate elevation and azimuth for aiming artillery, which had a range of several miles. The firing table calculations were accomplished by about one hundred women operating mechanical desk calculators. Each combination of gun, round and geographical region required a unique set of firing tables. It took about 750 calculations to compute a single trajectory and each table had about 3,000 trajectories. It took human computer at least 7 hours to calculate one trajectory. To increase production, BRL enlisted the computing facilities of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University"
"the US Army, and at the time they were hiring female programmers in particular due to the fact that many young American men were fighting overseas in World War II. Bilas and her Chestnut Hill College classmate Kathleen Antonelli were part of a smaller team within the ENIAC team. In addition to their larger programming duties, they were also assigned to the operation of an analog computing machine known as a Differential Analyzer, which was used to calculate ballistics equations (something which all the women on the ENIAC team were proficient at doing by hand). When the War ended, both"
"consultant to Los Alamos National Laboratory working on nuclear weapons. Garwin was the author of the actual design used in the first hydrogen bomb (code-named Mike) in 1952. He was assigned the job by Edward Teller, with the instructions that he was to make it as conservative a design as possible in order to prove the concept was feasible. He also worked on the development of the first spy satellites, for which he was named one of the ten founders of national reconnaissance. While at IBM, his work on spin-echo magnetic resonance laid the foundations for MRI; he was the"
"for features like mass storage, plotter graphics, string variables and matrix operations. It had a one-line LED panel for line editing, but was followed in the late 1970s by the faster HP 9835 and HP 9845 desktop computers with full screen CRT displays. These were amongst the first workstations aimed at scientists and engineers for both technical computing and instrumentation control. These were followed by the HP 9826 and HP 9836 computers, which were the leading models of the HP 9000 series of computers. All four of these computers ran versions of Rocky Mountain BASIC. These computers were often used"
"input data values. A BASIC game known simply as ""Artillery"" was written by Mike Forman and was published in ""Creative Computing"" magazine in 1976. This seminal home computer version of the game was revised in 1977 by M. E. Lyon and Brian West and was known as ""War 3""; ""War 3"" was revised further in 1979 and published as ""Artillery-3"". These early versions of turn-based tank combat games interpreted human-entered data such as the distance between the tanks, the velocity or ""power"" of the shot fired and the angle of the tanks' turrets. The Tektronix 4051 BASIC language desktop computer"
"left over from World War II. Copies became the first computers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Purdue University. In 1953 he developed the inertial electrostatic gyroscope (ESG), which was manufactured by Honeywell and other companies. It was used as part of the inertial navigation system of nuclear submarines, allowing them to travel underwater for months at a time without having to surface to ascertain their location. He also proposed the Cornfield system, a computer-based decision-making system for the air defense of ships using radar. This was one of the first applications of computer technology for decision makings. He"
"a system that could track and intercept enemy bomber aircraft using information from remote radar stations. It was the first computer system to feature real-time processing, multiplexing, and display devices. It was the first general computing machine, and a direct predecessor of modern computers. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II quickly followed the 1945 Trinity nuclear test, and the Little Boy device was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Exploding with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tonnes of TNT, the blast and thermal wave of the bomb"
"Soviet digital computing and were used for calculating missile trajectories which the first problem solved but the large high speed computer M-2, was the calculation of thermodynamic and hydrodynamic parameters for missile design. Anti-missile defenses also pushed for computer developments. One of the first problems solved by a computer was the calculation of the dependency of the target destruction probability on the detonation efficiency of fragmentation warheads. The Soviet Union got in the game of computers early and further developed them to make them into useful pieces of equipment for military purposes. This was fueled in part by wanting to"
"aerial bombing trajectories during World War II. After World War II the advent of the silicon semiconductor based digital computer made it possible to create trajectories for the guided missiles/bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles and space vehicles. Between World War I and II the U.S. Army Ballistics research laboratories at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland, USA developed the standard models for G2, G5, G6. In 1965, Winchester Western published a set of ballistics tables for G1, G5, G6 and GL. In 1971 Sierra Bullet Company retested all their bullets and concluded that the G5 model was not the best model for their"
"its predecessor, ORDVAC, used their own unique notation for hexadecimal numbers. Instead of the sequence A B C D E F universally used today, the digits ten to fifteen were represented by the letters K S N J F L, corresponding to the teletypewriter characters on five-track paper tape. BRLESC The BRLESC I (Ballistic Research Laboratories Electronic Scientific Computer) was a first-generation electronic computer built by the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground with assistance from the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and was designed to take over"
"of the first useful autopilots, which could be used to directly dial in the required path and have the aircraft fly to that heading with no further input. A variety of bombing systems using one or both of these systems were considered throughout the 1920s and 30s. During the same period, a separate line of development was leading to the first reliable mechanical computers. These could be used to replace a complex table of numbers with a carefully shaped cam-like device, and the manual calculation though a series of gears or slip wheels. Originally limited to fairly simple calculations consisting"
"differential engines could be fully used to compensate for stochastic behaviors of enemy aircraft and large guns. A new age of intelligent warfare had begun. This work at MIT and Bell Labs would later lead to Norbert Wiener's development of the electronic computer and the science of cybernetics for the same purpose, speeding the differential calculation process exponentially and taking one more giant step toward the creation of the modern digital computer using von Neumann architecture. Dr. von Neumann was one of the original mathematicians employed in the development of differential equations for ballistic warfare. History of numerical solution of"
"when declared surplus by the Federal Government, went to various United States universities. The one at Carnegie was used as an undergraduate project until 1971, when the former electrical engineering undergraduate students (Athena Systems Development Group) orchestrated its donation to the Smithsonian Institution. ATHENA computer The UNIVAC Athena computer was the processor for ground commands to the HGM-25A Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) as part of Western Electric's missile guidance system. The Athena was the ""first transistorized digital computer to be produced in numbers."" Athena, consisting of ten cabinets plus console on a 13.5 by 20 foot (4.1 by"
"several occasions, but it was only finally terminated in 1948. During World War II, BTM was called upon to design and manufacture a machine to assist breaking the German Enigma machine ciphers. This machine, known as a Bombe, was initially conceived by Alan Turing, but the actual machine was designed by BTM chief engineer Harold 'Doc' Keen, who had led the company's engineering department throughout the 1930s. The project was codenamed ""CANTAB"". By the end of the European war, over two hundred bombes had been built and installed. BTM built a valve based computer called the HEC (Hollerith Electronic Computer)."
"Harwell CADET The Harwell CADET was the first fully transistorised computer in Europe, and may have been the first fully transistorised computer in the world. The electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, UK built the Harwell Dekatron Computer in 1951, which was an automatic calculator where the decimal arithmetic and memory were electronic, although other functions were performed by relays. By 1953, it was evident that this did not meet AERE's computing needs, and AERE director Sir John Cockcroft encouraged them to design and build a computer using transistors throughout. E. H. Cooke-Yarborough based the design"
"Whirlwind I Whirlwind I was a Cold War-era vacuum tube computer developed by the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory for the U.S. Navy. It was among the first digital electronic computers that operated in real-time for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems. It was one of the first computers to calculate in parallel (rather than serial), and was the first to use magnetic core memory. Its development led directly to the Whirlwind II design used as the basis for the United States Air Force SAGE air defense system, and indirectly to almost all"
"who on the one hand gave two independent but equivalent definitions of computability, and on the other gave concrete examples for undecidable questions. Shortly after World War II, the first general purpose computers became available. In 1954, Martin Davis programmed Presburger's algorithm for a JOHNNIAC vacuum tube computer at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. According to Davis, ""Its great triumph was to prove that the sum of two even numbers is even"". More ambitious was the Logic Theory Machine in 1956, a deduction system for the propositional logic of the ""Principia Mathematica"", developed by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon"
"Magnetic Drum Digital Differential Analyzer The MADDIDA (MAgnetic Drum DIgital Differential Analyzer) was a special-purpose digital computer used for solving systems of ordinary differential equations. It was the first computer to represent bits using voltage levels and whose entire logic was specified in Boolean algebra. Invented by Floyd Steele, MADIDDA was developed at Northrop Aircraft Corporation between 1946-49 to be used as a guidance system for the Snark missile. No guidance system, however, resulted from the work on the MADDIDA, and rather it was used for aeronautical research In 1952, the MADDIDA became the world's top-selling commercial digital computer (albeit"
"United States with computers began. The United States quickly started to adapt computers to defense and military purposes. The air force was one of the first military branches to adapt and use computers for their uses. The air force established a Reeves analogue computer at the Wright Air Development Center at Daytona for developing weapons systems. It had already been used in the Korean War to track enemy shells back to their source which was then destroyed. The Navy then deployed its Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) as a means of accurately firing a naval gun at a target, taking"
"computer, the ENIAC. If the Analytical Engine had been built, it would have been digital, programmable and Turing-complete. It would, however, have been very slow. Luigi Federico Menabrea reported in ""Sketch of the Analytical Engine"": ""Mr. Babbage believes he can, by his engine, form the product of two numbers, each containing twenty figures, in three minutes"". By comparison the Harvard Mark I could perform the same task in just six seconds. A modern PC can do the same thing in well under a billionth of a second. Analytical Engine The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by"
"Fermi, and Hans Bethe. Following the radiation implosion idea offered by Teller and Ulam early in 1951, the focus of the work was on this new design idea. In June 1951, Ken returned to Princeton to continue the H-bomb work there at Wheeler's Project Matterhorn. Much of Ken's work was concerned with writing programs and doing calculations related to thermonuclear burning, first using human ""computers"" with desk calculators, then IBM card-programmed calculators (CPCs), and later, with Project Matterhorn, the SEAC computer at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC. A SEAC calculation, programmed by Ken with the assistance of"