Post World War II

1945

Grace Murray Hopper, working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark II computer, found the first computer bug beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stops (frequently) they tell Howard Aiken that they are "debugging" the computer. The very first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.

1946

14 February: The ENIAC was unveiled in Philadelphia. The ENIAC represented still a stepping stone towards the true computer, for differently than Babbage, Eckert and Mauchly, although they knew that the machine was not the ultimate in the state-of-the-art technology, completed the construction. eniac 2

ENIAC was programmed through the rewiring the interconnections between the various components and included the capability of parallel computation. ENIAC was later to be modified into a stored program machine.

Later that year Eckert and Mauchly, in a patent dispute with the University of Pennsylvania, left the University to establish the first computer company -- Electronic Control Corp. with a plan to build the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). After many crises they built the BINAC for Northrup Aviation, and were taken over by Remington-Rand before the UNIVAC was completed. At the same time the Electronic Research Associates (ERA) was incorporated in Minneapolis and took their knowledge of computing devices to create a line of computers; later ERA was also assimilated into Remington-Rand.

That same year the AIEE Committee on Large-Scale Computing Devices was formed, with the chair, Charles Concordia (May/June 1946-49); the committee that is the origin of the IEEE Computer Society in 1963.

1947

William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invent the "transfer resistance" device, later to be known as the transistor that will revolutionize the computer and give it the reliability that could not achieved with vacuum tubes.

1948

The work on a stored program computer was ongoing in at least four locations -- at the University of Pennsylvania , with John von Neumann at Princeton University, with Maurice Wilkes at Cambridge University, and at the University of Manchester. Douglas Hartree had visited various locations in the US and had returned to England to convince his colleagues, manchester mark-1

Freddy Williams and Tom Kilburn, to build a computer. Max Newman, one of the leaders of the Bletchley Park activity, had created the Royal Society Computing Laboratory at Manchester. On June 21, 1948 their prototype machine, the "Baby" was operated for the first time; the world truly moved from the domain of calculators to the domain of computers. The Ferranti Corporation took the design and began a line of computers that were one of the major components of the British Computer Industry.

T.J. Watson Sr., miffed at Howard Aiken at the lack of recognition at selective_sequence control computer the dedication of the Automatic Sequence Control Calculator [ASCC] (Harvard Mark I) and unnerved by the success of ENIAC, ordered the building of the Selective Sequence Control Computer (SSEC) for IBM. Though not a stored program computer, the SSEC was the first step of IBM from total dedication to punched card tabulators to the world of computers.

1949

Just a year after the Manchester Baby machine became the first operating

stored program machine in the world, then first large scale, fully functional, stored-program electronic digital computer was developed by Maurice Wilkes and the staff of the Mathematical Laboratory at Cambridge University. It was named EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer); the primary storage system was a set of mercury baths through which generated and regenerated acoustic pulses represented the bits of data.
Back in the US the National Bureau of Standards began work on two machines. standard western automatic computer

The Bureau had been made responsible for managing the contract for the delivery of the UNIVAC to the Census Bureau, but recognized that it needed computational facilities for its own work. Sam Alexander took charge of the development of the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), while Harry Huskey (builder of the Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory [NPL], the British equivalent of NBS) led the development of the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC).