I am a Computer

I was first designed in 1833 by a mathematician and inventor named Charles Babbage. He designed me to be the very first Analytical Engine. I was designed to be powered by steam. Not electricity. Later in the 1990s, another British mathematician, Ada Lovelace, studied my blueprints and took notes on how I could be used. Her notes were later published in 1843. Later, a programming language would be named after her (Ada). Then came Alan Turing, he, as well, was a British mathematician. He collaborated with a team of other people to create a computer that could read secret coded messages. They helped save many lives in WW2. His face is on the English £50 note.

Later, the first actual computers were built they needed to fit in a room. These computers were as large as a room. They were enormously heavy and exceedingly difficult to transfer from one room to another. One example of this was the Z3 computer, built by Konrad Zuse in Berlin in 1941. It is the world’s first functional programmable electromechanical me! I used over two thousand relays and worked at around 5Hz (Hertz: A unit of frequency, 1Hz is equal to one cycle per second.)

After that came my dear cousin, Z4, also invented by Konrad Zues. It was completed in 1945, it used Electromagnetic relays (2,600 of them) and was delivered to ETH Zurich in 1950. It ran scientific calculations until he died in 1955. 

Around the same time, my nephew was born in November 1945 by John Mauchly & Presper Eckert Jr. He used 17,500 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and decimal arithmetic power. He occupied two 10-by-30-foot halls and consumed 150 kW (Kilowatt, a unit of measurement in energy) (A typical hair dryer uses 1-2 kW). The ENIAC was used to calculate artillery firing tables for the US military.

Then came my sister-in-law, she was the UNIVAC 1 (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) designed by  Eckert & Mauchly’s team under contract to the U.S. Census Bureau; the first UNIVAC 1 was delivered on March 31, 1951. She was first sponsored by the USA’s Census Bureau. $300,000 had been put into her. Then, overruns in the price and schedule led to Mr Remington Rand acquiring the firm in the 1950s. The first ever UNIVAC 1 cost $1,000,000, and by 1958, 48 of these UNIVAC 1s were sold. The machine had a Remington Rand Punched-card reader with a rate of 600 cards per minute.

So, in conclusion, I had a long family tree before reaching me, I had my father and my mother, and then I have my other cousins and more and more in my family tree. So, I hope you liked my document, and I hope you have learned a lot today.

Works Cited

COLLECTION. findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/2/resources/196. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025.

"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=12." IEEE. ARTICLE.

NEWS NETTER. www.netnewsledger.com/2023/09/20/forging-the-digital-frontier-the-univac-i-and-remington-rands-impact-on-computing/. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025.

United States, Congress, Senate. Senate Document. Census, UNKNOWN, www.census.gov/library/publications/1951/demo/pet-51.html. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025.

"UNKNOWN." ARCHIVE, archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2009/11/102722064.05.01.acc.pdf. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025.