Before 1936, the concept of computers involved a person doing manual calculations. The first computer to be built for the use of World War II was the Colossus, which was used by Britain for cryptanalysis and decryption of German wireless communication. (Wells, pg.1) This marked the beginning for computers to play a highly important role during war. After the Colossus, the ENIAC, EDVAC, and IAS followed in the United States, which helped unfold new ideas for future generation of computers. Their contribution to war efforts made a huge impact in the way computers were viewed as performing other general tasks. These computers were considered first and second generators, in that they contained vacuum tubes, and transistors …show more content…
They are known as the first three programmable digital electronic computers. (Burks, pg.1) Soon after, John W. Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert created the Electronic Numerical Integrator Computer (ENIAC) from 1943-1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineer. (Burks, pg.4) The ENIAC became the first programmable computer, as well as the first general-purpose electronic computer. (Burks, pg.13) Its design came from the analog mechanical computer (DA), which had been previously used by Atanasoff in the ABC. The ENIAC was built shortly after the United States entered War World II; it was designed to be used for ballistic analysis and to calculate the trajectory of naval shells during the war. However, it was not completed on time to be used during the war, in fact it wasn’t available until 1946. In 1945 it was used by Edward Teller to compute a conjecture for the hydrogen bomb he was designing. Despite not being functional for War World II it led to first commercial computer to be available to a select group of business