Electro-Mechanical Era

2.) Explain The Electro-Mechanical Era in chronological order.

The calculator of this age was developed by using mechanical and electronic component vacuum tube.
Successful general purpose mechanical computers were built, in the 1930s. Konrad Zuse developed mechanical computer, the Z1, in 1983 in Germany.

• The Mark I Computer (1937 - 1944)

A Professor of Physics, Howard H. Aiken designed a general purpose mechanical computer at Harvard University and IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (IBM ASCC). It was the first fully automatic calculating machine and later as Harvard Mark I.

It used binary numbers for its operation. Later, Mark II was invented by Aiken and his colleagues that were working electromechanical relays for its operation. Mark II used 19000 valves.

• The Mark II Computer

It used about 18 thousand vacuum tubes as the main memory device with 7 lakes 50 thousand parts. It is 51 feet long, 8 feet height and 3 feet wide as bulky in size.It was capable of performing five basic arithmetic operations; additions, subtraction, multiplication, division and table reference. The result was printed at the rate of one result per five seconds.

• The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (1939 - 1942)

In 1939, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry designed Atanasoff-Berry computer or ABC solving systems of mathematical simultaneous equation. It used 18000 valves and other 45 valves for internal logic and capacitors for storage.

It used punch cards as input and output operation i.e. secondary. It is considered as the first computing machine which introduced the idea of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory and logic circuits.

• The Colossus (1941 - 1944)

In 1944, Colossus computer is designed by Alan M. Turing and build by British mathematician Alan Mathison Neuman, Alan with some colleagues, creates a computer named colossus at the University of Manchester, England, which comprised 1800 vacuum tubes.

It was one of the world's earliest working programmable electronic digital computers. Colossus was a special purpose machine that suited a narrow range of tax (for example, it was capable of performing decimal multiplication).

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