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While I researching the things for my project I learned that Konrad Zuse the inventor of the Konrad Zuse computer was born on 1910. He was a German civil engineer, inventor, and computer pioneer. He achieved the first fully functional computer. It was the Z3 and it was finished in May of 1941. He was also known for the S2 computer it was the first process controlled computer. He also founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941 and it produced the Z4 computer. The Z4 was the first commercial computer. Most of his work was paid for by his family but after 1939 he was given resources by the Nazi German government because of World War 2. His work was largely unnoticed by the U.S. and the U.K. his first documented influence on a U.S. company was the IBMs option on his parents in 1946. He died in 1995.

I did not know that the ENIAC was the first electronic purpose computer. Besides its speed the most amazing thing about the ENIAC was its size and complexity. It used 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and around 5 million hand soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 tons, it was 8 by 3 by 100 feet, it took up 1800 square feet of space, and it consumed more than 150 kW of power. This all led to a rumor that whenever its lights came on the whole city of Philadelphia’s lights dimmed. Input was possible from an IBM card reader and an IBM card punch. These cards were used to printed output offline using an IMB accounting machine such as the IBM 405. It was possible to wire the carry of one of the accumulator into another accumulator to use double precision arithmetic.

I did not know that the Harvard Mark 1 computer had 60 sets of 24 for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers. Each were 23 decimals long. It could do any additions or subtractions at once all in a second. A multiplication would take six seconds to complete and a division would take 15.3 seconds to complete. And a logarithm or a trigonometric function would take over a minute to complete. For the Harvard Mark 1 computer read the instructions from a 24 channel punched paper tape and executed the current instruction and then it read in the next one. It had no conditional branch instruction which meant that the complex programs were to be long. A loop was made by connecting the end of a paper tape containing the program back to the beginning of the tape which literally created a loop and separated the data and instructions known as the Harvard Architecture.