History of computing

   In 1937, Claude Shannon showed that there is a line one-to-one relationship between the concepts of Boolean logic, and some electronic circuits, which are called "logic gates", which is now widely used in digital computers. While working at MIT, in its substantive work, he demonstrated that electronic communications and switches may be an expression of Boolean algebra. So his work A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, he created the basis for practical design of digital circuits.

   In November 1937 George Stibits completed at Bell Labs create the computer «Model K» on the basis of relay switches. In late 1938, Bell Labs had authorized a study on the new program, led by Stibitsem. As a result, 8 January 1940 was completed Complex Number Calculator, who can perform calculations on complex numbers. September 11, 1940 at Dartmouth College, at the demonstration at the conference of the American Mathematical Society, Stibits sent computer commands remotely, via the telephone with TTY. This was the first computing device when used remotely. Among the conference participants and witnesses to the demonstration were John Von Neumann, John Mouchli and Norbert Wiener, who wrote about it in his memoirs.

   In 1939, John Vincent Atanassov (John Vincent Atanasoff) and Clifford Berry (Clifford E. Berry) from the University of Iowa have developed Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). It was the world's first electronic digital computer. The design consisted of more than 300 vacuum tubes, as the memory used by a rotating drum. Despite the fact that the ABC machine was not programmable, it was the first using vacuum tubes in the adder. ENIAC co-inventor John Mouchli studied ABC in June 1941, and there are disputes among historians about the extent of its influence on the development of machines that followed the ENIAC. ABC has been almost forgotten, until the focus was not a claim of "Honeywell v. Sperry Rand», which annulled the ruling on patent on the ENIAC (and several other patents), due to the fact that, among other reasons, the work of Atanasoff was performed earlier.

   In 1939, Endicott laboratories at IBM began work on the Harvard Mark I. Officially known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, Mark I was an electromechanical computer for general purpose, created with the financing of IBM and with the assistance of staff IBM, led by Harvard mathematician Howard Aiken. The project is a computer was created under the influence of Charles Babbage's analytical engine, using decimal arithmetic, wheels for storage and rotary switches in addition to electromagnetic relays. The machine was programmable by punched tape, and had several computing units working in parallel. Later versions had a few readers with computer tape, and the machine could switch between readers, depending on the state. Nevertheless, the car was not Turing-complete. Mark I was moved to Harvard University and began work in May 1944.