Feb 3, 2020 · Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed the MARK series of computers at Harvard University beginning in 1944. The MARK computers began with the Mark I. Imagine a giant room full of noisy, clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and eight feet high. The five-ton device contained almost 760,000 separate pieces.

The Harvard Mark I, or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was one of the earliest general-purpose electromechanical computers used in the war effort during the last part of World War II.

Dec 3, 2014 · By 1945, thanks largely to Hopper, the Harvard Mark I was the world’s most easily programmable big computer. It could switch tasks simply by getting new instructions via punched paper tape rather than requiring a reconfiguration of its hardware or cables.

One of these was Lieutenant (later Admiral) Grace M. Hopper, a mathematician who, in her own words, had "never met a digit" until joining the Computation Laboratory (quoted in Ceruzzi 1985, xviii); she would go on to become one of the most famous of the postwar computer pioneers, making fundamental contributions to the development of the first ...

Harvard Mark I, 1943 Designed by Howard Aiken, this electromechanical computer, more than 15 meters (50 feet) long and containing some 750,000 components, was used to make ballistics calculations during World War II.

After the war, Grace Hopper was given the task of gathering all the dispersed knowledge related to the machine and publishing an instruction manual—a task so monumental that she referred to her project as a computer “bible.” It was a detailed treatment of Mark I’s physical components, operation, and maintenance.

Mar 24, 2025 · Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992): Computer scientist and mathematician. Her inventions made computers easier to program and use. Mark 1: The computer was one of the first digital calculators. It was 51 feet (15.5 meters) long and eight feet high (2.4 meters) high.

Aug 26, 2021 · This blog highlights a rare copy of the manual of operations for the Mark 1 computer written by Grace Hopper during WWII, and to tell the story of how she was able to accomplish this monumental task. Born in New York City, Grace Hopper graduated from Vassar College with degrees in math and physics.

Mar 25, 2024 · Grace Hopper and Richard Bloch were among the early programmers who prepared numerical analysis procedures by codifying them as sequences of logic steps using the Mark 1‘s instruction set. The specialized skill of computer programming was just emerging to leverage these new programmable systems.

Oct 2, 2019 · Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneer in the field of computer science. She worked as a programmer for the Harvard Mark I computer in the final years of World War II. She also worked on the Mark II and Mark III computers. After working on the Mark computer programs, she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia—the company building UNIVAC I, the first commercial ...