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Forty-six UNIVAC computers were built for both government and business uses. Remington Rand became the first American manufacturers of a commercial computer system. The American military sponsored their research; the army needed a computer for calculating artillery-firing tables, the settings used for different weapons under varied conditions for target accuracy. The computer, controlled by pre-punched paper tape, could carry out addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and reference to previous results. John Atanasoff wrote most of the concepts of the first modern computer on the back of a cocktail napkin. He realized that an automatic-calculator device would require three basic elements: a control, a memory, and a calculator for the arithmetic. |
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