MARK+1

Mark I was also called Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). It was created by IBM and was devised by Howard H. Aiken. It was called Mark I by Harvard university and it was the first large scale automatic digital computer in the United States. It was shipped to Harvard in Feb. 1944 and arrived on Aug. 1944 and was fully automatic and didn’t require humans once it started. It was considered to be “the beginning of the era of the modern computer” and was very reliable. The elements of ASCC were switches, relays, rotating shafts and clutches. It was made up of 765,000 components; hundreds of miles of wires 60 sets of 24 switches and could store 72 numbers and each 23 decimals long. The dimensions were 51 ft length, 8 ft in height, 2 ft deep, and weighted 10,000 lbs. It took one second to do three addition or subtraction, six seconds to do multiplication, 15 for division, and over a minute for logarithms and trigonometry. The ASCC was also used by the NAVY for gunnery and ballistic calculations and was controlled by pre-punched paper tape.