“While mechanical calculation goes back to the seventeenth
century, computation is far more recent. Though first conceived by
Charles Babbage in 1823, the computer as we know it needed more
than a century to come into being. The first true
electro-mechanical computer was Harold Aiken’s Mark I (conceived in
1937 and put into operation in 1944) and the first fully electronic
machine was Maurice Wilkes’ EDSAC (1949).“The first commercial computer, the IBM 701, wasn’t completed
until late in 1952. The first production machine was shipped from
Poughkeepsie to the IBM headquarters building in Manhattan that
December. The second machine was destined for Los Alamos, and
production continued in IBM’s Poughkeepsie facility through June
1954, when machine 18 was shipped to Lockheed in Burbank. That’s
rather slow production by our standards, but literally everything
was new in the early 1950s…”
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History of Free and Open Source–Introduction(Mar 28, 2005)
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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