Grace Hopper, UNIVAC, and the First Programming Language

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday May 18, 2014 @02:37AM from the back-in-the-day dept.

M-Saunders (706738) writes "It weighed 13 tons, had 5,200 vacuum tubes, and took up a whole garage, but the UNIVAC I was an incredible machine for its time. Memory was provided by tanks of liquid mercury, while the clock speed was a whopping 2.25 MHz. The UNIVAC I was one of the first commercial general-purpose computers produced, with 46 shipped, and Linux Voice has taken an in-depth look at it. Learn its fascinating instruction set, and also check out FLOW-MATIC, the first English-language data processing language created by American computing pioneer Grace Hopper."

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look, it's the moron AC again by rubycodez · 2014-05-18 03:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

no one has claimed only space exploration spinoffs gave us computer tech. once again you raise a straw man and then set it on fire.
However, ICBM and space exploration certainly did drive integrated circuit technology for computers. First computers built of Jack Kirby's solid state integrated circuits used by the air force in Minuteman II guidance system