Computer “an electronic device that computes”
Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944. The first programmable digital computer made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic computer. Instead the Mark I was constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches.
In 1965 the work of the German Konrad Zuse was published for the first time in English. Z( 1 and 2) was built between 1936 and 1938 in the parlor of his parent's home. Z3, built in 1941, was probably the first operational, general-purpose, programmable (that is, software controlled) digital computer. Zuse reinvented Babbage's concept of programming and decided on his own to employ binary representation for numbers.
The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the "computers"
Once ENIAC was finished and proved worthy of the cost of its development, its designers set about to eliminate the obnoxious fact that reprogramming the computer required a physical modification of all the patch cords and switches. It took days to change ENIAC's program. Eckert and Mauchly's next teamed up with the mathematician John von Neumann to design EDVAC, which pioneered the stored program. Because he was the first to publish a description of this new computer, von Neumann is often wrongly credited with the realization that the program (that is, the sequence of computation steps) could be represented electronically just as the data was. But this major breakthrough can be found in Eckert's notes long before he ever started working with von Neumann. Eckert was no slouch: while in high school Eckert had scored the second highest math SAT score in the entire country.
Eckert and Mauchly left the University of Pennsylvania over a dispute about who owned the patents for their invention. They decided to set up their own company. In the 50's, UNIVAC (a contraction of "Universal Automatic Computer") was the household word for "computer", was the first computer to employ magnetic tape. After a success there came personal computers together with the invention of microprocessor and IBM hiring firm called Microsoft to provide software for their products.
The 8080 was employed in the MITS Altair computer, which was the world's first personal computer (PC).
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