The earliest purpose of designing computers was to perform scientific calculations, and its main calculation problems were oriented to "military". During World War II, in order to solve the problem of calculating large amounts of military data, the U.S. military established a research team led by Mauchly and Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania and began to develop the world's first electronic computer.
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The earliest purpose of designing computers was to perform scientific calculations. Its main calculation problems were oriented to "military" and were used for ballistic calculations of military guns and testing of firepower tables.
The birth of the world's first electronic computerBackground
The idea of developing an electronic computer came about during the Second World War. At that time, fierce fighting was going on, and the weapons and equipment of various countries were still very poor. The main strategic weapons were aircraft and cannons. Therefore, it was very necessary and urgent to develop new cannons and missiles. To this end, the U.S. Army Ordnance Department established the "Ballistic Research Laboratory" in Aberdeen, Maryland.
The U.S. military requires the laboratory to provide the Army Artillery Force with 6 launch tables every day for technical evaluation of missile development. In fact, hundreds of ballistics need to be calculated for each shot table, and the mathematical model of each ballistic is a very complex set of nonlinear equations. There is no way to find exact solutions to these equations, so numerical methods can only be used to calculate them approximately.
But even using numerical methods to approximate the solution is not an easy task! According to the calculation tools at that time, even if the laboratory hired more than 200 calculators to work overtime, it would take more than two months to calculate a radiograph. In the war era where "time is victory", how could such a slow speed be possible? I'm afraid that even before advanced weapons are developed, defeat is already certain.
In order to change this unfavorable situation, John Mauchly, who was then working at the Mauch School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, proposed the initial idea of trial-producing the first electronic computer in 1942 - "high-speed electron tubes". "Use of Computing Devices", it is expected to replace relays with electronic tubes to increase the computing speed of the machine.
The U.S. military learned of this idea and immediately allocated funds to support it. It established a research team headed by Moshili and John Eckert to start the research and development work, with a budget of US$150,000. This was a huge sum of money at the time. If it weren't for the war, who would be willing to spend such a huge amount of money! Although war is all evil, it does not occasionally promote the development of science and technology.
What made the development work very lucky was that the mathematician von Neumann (1903-1957, a Hungarian-American) who was a consultant to the Institute of Ballistics and was participating in the development of the first atomic bomb in the United States ) faced a large number of computational problems encountered during the development of the atomic bomb (in 1944) and joined the development team in the middle of the development process. The original ENIAC had two problems: it had no memory and it was controlled using a wiring board. It even took several days to connect, and the computing speed was offset by this work. In 1945, von Neumann and his development team published a new "stored program universal electronic computer solution" based on joint discussions - EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). In the process, he made great contributions to computers. He made important contributions to the solution of many key problems, thus ensuring the smooth advent of the computer.
Although ENIAC is huge in size, consumes an astonishing amount of power, and operates only a few thousand times, it is 1,000 times faster than the existing computing devices at the time, and it can automatically perform arithmetic operations according to pre-programmed programs. Functions for logical operations and data storage. ENIAC announced the beginning of a new era. Since then, the door to scientific computing has been opened.
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