The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. EDSAC was the second electronic digital stored-program computer to go into regular service.
Later the project was supported by J. Lyons & Co. Ltd., intending to develop a commercially applied computer and succeeding in Lyons' development of LEO I, based on the EDSAC design. Work on EDSAC started during 1947, and it ran its first programs on 6 May 1949, when it calculated a table of square numbers and a list of prime numbers. EDSAC was finally shut down on 11 July 1958, having been superseded by EDSAC 2, which remained in use until 1965.
As soon as EDSAC was operational, it began serving the university's research needs. It used mercury delay lines for memory and derated vacuum tubes for logic. Power consumption was 11 kW of electricity. Cycle time was 1.5 ms for all ordinary instructions, 6 ms for multiplication. Input was via five-hole punched tape, and output was via a teleprinter.
Initially registers were limited to an accumulator and a multiplier register. In 1953, David Wheeler, returning from a stay at the University of Illinois, designed an index register as an extension to the original EDSAC hardware.
A magnetic-tape drive was added in 1952 but never worked sufficiently well to be of real use.
Until 1952, the available main memory (instructions and data) was only 512 18-bit words, and there was no backing store. The delay lines (or "tanks") were arranged in two batteries providing 512 words each. The second battery came into operation in 1952.
The full 1024-word delay-line store was not available until 1955 or early 1956, limiting programs to about 800 words until then.
John Lindley (diploma student 1958–1959) mentioned "the incredible difficulty we had ever to produce a single correct piece of paper tape with the crude and unreliable home-made punching, printing and verifying gear available in the late 50s".
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These programs enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. A computer system is a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware, operating system (main software), and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation.
ENIAC ('ɛniæk; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had combinations of these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one computer. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming. Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory), its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming language is usually split into the two components of syntax (form) and semantics (meaning), which are usually defined by a formal language. Some languages are defined by a specification document (for example, the C programming language is specified by an ISO Standard) while other languages (such as Perl) have a dominant implementation that is treated as a reference.
Multilevel gain-cell DRAMs are interesting to improve the area-efficiency of modern fault-tolerant systems-on-chip implemented in deep-submicron CMOS technologies. This paper addresses the problem of long access times in such multilevel gain-cell DRAMs, wh ...
Information technology has only been around for about fifty years. Although the beginnings of automatic calculation date from as early as the 17th century (W. Schickard built the first mechanical calculator in 1623), it took the invention of the transistor ...
We present an algorithm to compute a full set of irreducible representations of a supersolvable group G over a finite field K, charK |G|, which is not assumed to be a splitting field of G. The main subroutines of our algorithm are a modification of the alg ...