The world's first general-purpose computer "ENIAC" was born in February 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. Inventors are Americans Moakley and J.PresperEckert, and the U.S. Department of Defense uses it for ballistic calculation. It is a giant, with 18000 electron tubes, an area of 170 square meters, weighing 30 tons, consuming about 150 kilowatts of electricity, and performing 5000 operations per second, which is insignificant now, but unprecedented at that time. ENIAC uses electron tubes as components, so it is also called electron tube computer, which is the first generation computer. Electron tube computers are bulky, consume high power, are prone to heat, and cannot work for long.
ENIAC is a giant, covering an area of 1.70 square meters. If it is calculated according to the house price 1. 1 10,000 square meters, it needs 1.7 million. It weighs 28 tons, which is heavier than four gold hoops (weight of gold hoops108,000 Jin, about 6.5 tons).
ENIAC includes 18600 tubes, but it can only work stably for several hours. Even so, the lamp tube broke quickly, and it broke 19000 in the first year (some lamps were broken and replaced repeatedly).
ABC is not a general-purpose computer, and can only be used to solve equations, but it pioneered the manufacture of computers with electronic tubes, which is of epoch-making and far-reaching significance.
194 1 year, John Moakley, one of the main builders of ENIAC, spent five days in his home in atanasoff to seriously study ABC's design ideas and technical applications, moved to ENIAC, and won a research fund of 400,000 US dollars, which was beyond atanasoff's imagination. The basic design idea of ENIAC and the safety of adding and subtracting circuits are copies of ABC. When applying for a patent, atanasoff and Bailey's contribution was not mentioned. Atanasoff obtained more than 100 patents in his life, but he didn't pursue these patents out of disgust or disdain.
1956 On August 25th, the Preparatory Committee of Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences was established, with Hua as its director.
At that time, the world's first electronic computer appeared 10 years. How should the work start? The unanimous opinion is: first learn from the existing technology of the Soviet Union, and on this basis, carry out our own research according to the conditions of our country. That is, "imitate first, then innovate, and imitate for innovation."
The research and development work was quickly rolled out. "Send someone to the Soviet Union to investigate and study; Transfer university graduates to computer technology training courses; Concentrate on a group of scientific and technical personnel with certain work experience in similar majors to collaborate in computing and create a computer business. " Zhang Zichang, who participated in the development work of that year, wrote in his memory article.
Among them, mastering the whole machine technology as soon as possible is one of the key points. The calculation decided to copy the Soviet mainframe computer and M-3 minicomputer as a breakthrough. There is no real copy, but it is produced, installed and debugged according to Soviet drawings.
From 1957 to 65438+February, M-3 drawings began to arrive in Beijing in batches, and the imitation work began immediately, which became the first task of the whole machine. M-3 is a Soviet model, which was called "Bayi model" in China during trial production and "103 model" in industrial production. With the development of work and the increase of personnel, the project team is divided into five groups: power supply group, arithmetic unit group, controller group, drum group and input and output group.
At that time, there was no production force in the calculation, and the trial production was undertaken by No.738 Factory of No.4 Machinery Department. Finally, it took the 738 factory eight months to manufacture the first computer. On August 1958 and 1 day, this computer completed the operation of four instructions, announcing the birth of the first general-purpose digital electronic computer made in China.