John William Mauchly

Grace Hopper and the Programming Languages

9. December 2021 Harald Sack

On December 9, 1908, American computer scientist Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born. Besides being credited for having invented the term “debugging”, Hopper was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944. She invented the first compiler for a computer programming language and was one of those who popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level…

computer science

John Vincent Atanasoff and the first Electronic Digital Computer

4. October 2019 Harald Sack

On October 4, 1903, American physicist and inventor John Vincent Atanasoff was born. He is best known for being considered as one of the inventors of the electronic digital computer. Even computer scientists most probably haven’t heard anything of this computer pioneer. Of course you will have heard about Alan Turing [5] or John von Neumann,[6] who are traditionally referenced as being the fathers of modern computers. Maybe, in case you are German, then you might…

history

Behold the First Commercial Computer (in the US) – the UNIVAC I

14. June 2018 Harald Sack

On June 14, 1951 the very first electronic computer produced in series (and in the United States), the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the US States Census Bureau at the price of $1.6 Mio. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly,[1,2] the inventors of the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC.[2] Design work was begun by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and was completed after the company…

computer science