Electronic Period First Generation By: Angel Aponte, John Kirk, Dominique Davis, Shelby Jason

Introduction The main points we will cover in this presentation are: Flemming’s Vacuum Tube, the ENIAC, the EDSAC, and the UNIVAC. This generation occurred around the 1940’s/1950’s.

Other Historical Occurences World War II The Holocaust Antarctica was discovered to be a continent War production pulled us out of the Great Depression. Cold War begins

Flemming’s Vacuum Tube A vacuum tube also called a electron tubes is a sealed glass or metal enclosure used in electronic circuits to control the flow of electrons between the metal sealed inside the tubes. In 1904, John Ambrose Fleming invented the first electron tube called the 'Fleming Valve'. Fleming also invents the vacuum tube diode.John Ambrose Fleming vstartinventions/a/Vacuum_tube. htm

ENIAC In 1946, John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert developed the ENIAC I (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator). In one second, the ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions. The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet (167 square meters) of floor space, and weighed 30 tons. eekly/aa htm eekly/aa htm

EDSAC Maurice V. Wilkes at the university of Cambridge constructed the EDSAC: Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer. It’s memory contained 512 words of 17 bits. The EDSAC system was very slow but also more reliable than the electrostatic tubes. The clock speed was 0.5 MHz and the program supported relocatable code when the program was loaded. dsac.htm dsac.htm

UNIVAC In 1947, John Mauchly chose the name "UNIVAC" (Universal Automatic Computer) for his company's product. UNIVAC was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly (designers of the ENIAC). The UNIVAC handled both numbers and alphabetic characters. univac.htm univac.htm

Important Advances Since the creation of the machines in this generation the military was able to discover calculations much faster. Also, they could easily break codes that the enemy set up. In this period only the government and the military could use these machines because they took up so much space.

Conclusion A few statements that we covered were that the computers were very large and took up a lot of floor space. Also, the computers could calculate in seconds. And only the military and the government used these computers because they were so big.

Bibliography ons/a/Vacuum_tube.htm ons/a/Vacuum_tube.htm htm htm