Computers In The 1950s

Computers in the 1950’s

People have been in awe of computers since they were first invented. At first scientist said that computers would only be for government usage only. “Then when the scientists saw the potential computers had, scientist then predicted that by 1990 computers may one day invade the home of just about ever citizen in the world” (“History” Internet), the scientists were slightly wrong, because by 1990 computers were just beginning to catch on. Then a few years later when scientists when to major corporations to get help with a special project, the corporations said no, because computers would just be a fad and they wouldn’t make much money off of it. “By definition Abacus is the first computer (the proper definition of a computer is one who or that which computes) ever invented” (Internet).

The subject of this term paper will be about computers in the 1950’s. The divisions that will be covered are; the types of computers there were, the memory capacity of computers, the programming languages of that time, and the uses of the computers for that time. Information will be gathered from the Internet, from books, and from magazines, and from the encyclopedia.

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In the fifties, computers were in the experimental stage they were extremely hard to work with, and were a constant technicians worst nightmare, because often enough you had to replace the fuses (s Appendix a).

The memory capacity of that time was rather limited. “There were not many external drives, the only external drives of that time were I/O cards, I cards and O cards”

(“Whirlwind” Internet) “computers of that time were capable of a multitude of small tasks, like data processing (i.e. IRS related material, and information storage.), word processing (i.e. extremely early model of Microsoft word), data analysis (i.e. survey taking), complex calculations (i.e. weather prediction) communications (i.e., the telephone system (switching))” (“ Computers” Internet).

The lack of the internal drive, even 1 k drives proved to be very hard on the computers of the 1950’s (“Hackers” Internet) “with out the hard drives, programmers had to leave everything running all the time or print what they typed for the day and retype it the next day or they could save it to a I/O card” (“Computers” Internet). All three of these choices posed as a problem from programmers of that time, as first off to leave on the computer would cost a lot of money as it required a lot of money to maintain them while they are on.