| The Transistor | |
| It was the invention of the
transistor that made smaller and less expensive computers possible with
calculation speeds up to 10,000 calculations per second. The size of the
computers shrank, but it was still very expensive.
Punched cards were replaced with magnetic tape which gave computers the ability to read (input) and write (output) quickly and reliably. Program languages were developed and designed for the Department of Defense in 1959. These were the Basic FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) and the COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language). These first programming languages were similar, being strings of 1's and 0's representing the status of the switches (1=on, 0=off). Grace Murray Hopper, a Commodore in the Navy, designed COBOL and coined the phrase "debug" the computer. While she was working on the Mark II in 1945, a moth flew into the circuitry, causing an electrical short which halted the computer. While removing the dead moth, she said that the program would be running again after the computer had been "debugged." Today the process of removing errors from programs is still called debugging. |
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Mark 1 and Grace Hopper |
