Harvard Mark I

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Portion of the Harvard-IBM Mark 1, left side.
Portion of the Harvard-IBM Mark 1, left side.
Right side.
Right side.
Detail of Input/Output and control.
Detail of Input/Output and control.

The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), called the Mark I by Harvard University[1], was the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the USA. It is considered by some to be the first universal calculator.

The electromechanical ASCC was devised by Howard H. Aiken, created at IBM, shipped to Harvard in February 1944, and formally delivered there on August 7, 1944. The main advantage of the Mark I was that it was fully automatic—it didn't need any human intervention once it started. It was the first fully automatic computer to be completed. It was also very reliable, much more so than early electronic computers. It is considered to be "the beginning of the era of the modern computer"[citation needed] and "the real dawn of the computer age"[citation needed] .

The building elements of the ASCC were switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. It was built using 765,000 components and hundreds of miles of wire, amounting to a size of 51 feet (16 m) in length, eight feet (2.4 m) in height, and two feet deep. It had a weight of about 10,000 pounds (4500 kg). The basic calculating units had to be synchronized mechanically, so they were run by a 50 foot (15 m) shaft driven by a five-horsepower (4 kW) electric motor. From the IBM Archives:

The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard Mark I) was the first operating machine that could execute long computations automatically. A project conceived by Harvard University's Dr. Howard Aiken, the Mark I was built by IBM engineers in Endicott, N.Y. A steel frame 51 feet long and eight feet high held the calculator, which consisted of an interlocking panel of small gears, counters, switches and control circuits, all only a few inches in depth. The ASSC used 500 miles of wire with three million connections, 3,500 multipole relays with 35,000 contacts, 2,225 counters, 1,464 tenpole switches and tiers of 72 adding machines, each with 23 significant numbers. It was the industry's largest electromechanical calculator[2].

The Mark I could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal digits long. It could do three additions or subtractions in a second. A multiplication took six seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute.

The Mark I read its instructions from a 24 channel punched paper tape and executed the current instruction and then read in the next one. It had no conditional branch instruction. This meant that complex programs had to be physically long. A loop was accomplished by joining the end of the paper tape containing the program back to the beginning of the tape (literally creating a loop). This separation of data and instructions is known as the Harvard architecture. The first programmers of the Mark I were Richard Milton Block, Robert Campbell, and computing pioneer Grace Hopper, respectively.[3]

At the dedication ceremony, Aiken failed to mention the involvement of IBM in designing and building the computer. IBM was not pleased with this, and parted ways with Aiken. IBM named the computer the ASCC but Harvard and Aiken renamed it the Mark I. IBM went on to build the SSEC.

The Mark I was followed by the Harvard Mark II (1947 or 1948), Mark III/ADEC (September 1949), and Harvard Mark IV (1952) – all the work of Aiken. The Mark II was an improvement over the Mark I, but it also used electromechanical relays. The Mark III used some electronic components and the Mark IV was all-electronic, using solid state components. The Mark III and Mark IV used magnetic drum memory and the Mark IV also had magnetic core memory. The Mark II and Mark III went to the US Navy base at Dahlgren, Virginia. The Mark IV was built for the US Air Force, but it stayed at Harvard.

The Mark I was eventually disassembled, although portions of it remain at Harvard in the Science Center.

Grace Hopper popularized the story that the word "bug" (in the sense of a technical problem) was inspired by a moth crushed in a relay of the Mark I, but this is not true (see Computer bug#Etymology).

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[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The machine's name as actually displayed on the hardware itself is Aiken-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator Mark I.
  2. ^ IBM Archives: FAQ / Products and Services
  3. ^ Wexelblat, Richard L. (Ed.) (1981). History of Programming Languages, p. 20. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-745040-8

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