Wwii, Grace Hopper With Harvard Mark 1
by Science Source
Title
Wwii, Grace Hopper With Harvard Mark 1
Artist
Science Source
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Grace Hopper and Howard Hathaway Aiken (bottom center) with unidentified members of the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project, sitting in front of the Harvard Mark 1 computer. The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), called Mark I by Harvard University’s staff, was a general purpose electromechanical computer that was used in the war effort during the last part of WWII. One of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on March 29, 1944 by John von Neumann. At that time, von Neumann was working on the Manhattan project, and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical tables. The Mark I had 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal digits long. It could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second. A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute. The first programmers of the Mark I were computing pioneers Richard Milton Bloch, Robert Campbell, and Grace Hopper.
Uploaded
April 15th, 2019
Embed
Share
Comments
There are no comments for Wwii, Grace Hopper With Harvard Mark 1. Click here to post the first comment.