Intelligent Call Routing :: essays research papers

Intelligent Call Routing Mr. Harrison decides to call his credit card company to inquire about a credit limit increase. He picks up the phone and dials the company’s 800 number. He is then prompted by a friendly voice that says, â€Å"Welcome to Mycorp, please enter your 15 digit account number†. After punching his15-digit account number into the handset, he is quickly prompted by a friendly agent who greets him with, â€Å"Hello Mr. Harrison, how are you today?† Surprised that the agent knew he was the one calling, he then mentions that he is interested in a credit limit increase. After the agent helps him with his primary objective, the agent says, â€Å"I noticed you have been traveling a lot lately; would you be interested in upgrading to our new Travelers Green Card?† That’s right. The agent knows a lot about him, but how? Remember the 15-digit account number he entered? To Mycorp it’s much more then 15-digits: it’s about every product he has purchased using his Mycorp credit card; his language preference; if he is past due on his bill; if he is considered a high value customer to the organization; the type of card he has, and much more. The call center of today is evolving at an extraordinary rate. New technologies are popping up all over the globe bringing to the table new and exciting products that will help companies to service their customers in faster and smarter ways. One of the products with the most impact on the market today being used to accomplish this is Intelligent Call Management. Many large organizations such as American Express, Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, and Discover Card are using Intelligent Call Management to provide better service to their customers. A recent survey discovered that 90% of today’s call centers are using voice-processing applications, while another 54% have introduced Intelligent Call Management into their call center. Intelligent Call Management, or ICM, cannot be accomplished with one single piece of hardware. It involves multiple peripherals working together, each providing a different functionality that contributes to the efficiency of the call delivery. (â€Å"Are Y ou,† 2004) Computers and the telephone have technologically collided and as a result CTI, or Computer Telephony Integration, was born. The CTI component is the most important piece in an ICM environment. With CTI, companies are improving their efficiency, lowering their operating costs, and building the infrastructure for new business opportunities.

Education: Encouraging Lives Essay -- Education Careers Teaching Teach

Education: Encouraging Lives My desire to become a teacher goes beyond a professional aspiration; it is also a personal commitment to self-growth and societal advancement. Since the time I was in school I have had the opportunity and pleasure to work with young people and listen to their problems in school and in their lives on a level where I’m neither a peer nor an authority figure. During this time I have decided to devote myself to these young people; I want to know that I can make a difference in their lives. With my teaching certificate, I will fulfill personal goals, make a change in student’s lives, and inspire younger generations to look for horizons as of yet unconceivable to them. I am now old enough to know what is truly important to me. My life is enriched by improving the quality of others’ lives. Only through exposure, only through learning, can anyone aspire to reach his or her greatest potential. In essence, how can we dream of greater possibilities if we do not know they exist? As in the Biblical parable, I want to teach men to fish and feed them for a lifetime. From my personal experience I believe some teachers have forgotten what a critical role they play in not only the futures of the students who sit before them, but in the future of all our lives collectively. I do not want anyone to look back on their life and see me as one of these teachers but as a teacher that inspired them to be something they never dreamed possible. Teaching involves a multi-level commitment to each and every student, including teaching styles, respect, counseling, and inspiration. Psychologists recognize that individuals have a variety of comprehension and learning abilities. Some people learn through audio and visual stimul... ...e to understand by using real-world experiences. I believe as Jean Piaget did, a constructivist, "to understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied with if in the future individuals are to be formed who are capable of production and creativity and not simply repetition" as mentioned in his book, To Understand Is to Invent. I do believe people need to learn with Great Books, but comparing things with the real world helps the understanding of these books. In conclusion, my desire to teach is only impeded by the next few years of education that I need to acquire my degree. I understand this will change the role I play in youth’s lives from my current position to an authority figure, but I do believe it will be a change for the best. Teachers wear big shoes and I am committed to filling those to the best of my ability.

The New Age Employee Essays -- American Red Cross Workers Essays

The New Age Employee The Human Resource issue that I will be discussing in my paper stems from the American Red Cross. The first, thing I will discuss is the organization’s external environment and then the HR department’s internal system. In the external environment of the American Red Cross, there are several issues affecting the organization. For example, the U.S population is becoming more diverse according to demographics. Also, the number of donors and volunteer’s is steadily decreasing, and the baby boomers are approaching the age of retirement. As a result, they will take with them, a large amount of the American Red Cross volunteer hours. Consequently, the American Red Cross is looking for volunteer’s to fill their offices nationwide. Internally there are also a lot of issues occurring within the organization’s human resource department. For instance, the new and younger employees coming into the organization, and they are expecting new ways of being recognized for their good work. As a result, the HR department is inventing new ways to accommodate these employees. Which requires the organization to actively go out and recruit employees. This is something that the organization has not encountered before. In my opinion, the American Red Cross should adapt to the changes in their external environment. Such as: the changes in the demographics of the employees within the organization and how those new employees affect the human resources department’s functions. Because, there are no longer just white men at the top of the organization; there are minorities and women that are in the corporate culture. As a result, it is the duty of an organization to adapt and change to its av... ...ix A. Nigro. (1994) 4th Edition.The New Public Personnel Administration. F.E. Peacock Publishers, Inc. 2.) Dennis L. Dresang. (1999) 3rd Edition. Public Personnel Management and Public Policy. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 3.) Library of Congress. (2000). Managing Human Resources: A Partnership Perspective. Author, Susan E. Jackson, Randall S. Schuler. South-Western College Publishing, a division of Thomson Learning. 4.) Library of Congress. (2000). Managing Human Resources: A Partnership Perspective. Author, Susan E. Jackson, Randall S. Schuler. South-Western College Publishing, a division of Thomson Learning. 5.) Llyod G. Nigro, Felix A. Nigro. (1994) 4th Edition.The New Public Personnel Administration. F.E. Peacock Publishers, Inc. 6.)Dennis L. Dresang. (1999) 3rd Edition. Public Personnel Management and Public Policy. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.

Every culture has a different set of traits and habits

I agree with the first part of the article. Every culture has a different set of traits and habits. The norms which are considered common in one culture may be considered in-appropriate in other culture. For example in Western culture it’s normal to use credit card or open up personal information to vendors; which is not workable in Eastern societies that includes not only Egypt but India as well. The reason for such cultural attitude is the way business is done. In Eastern it is rare for two individual to do business to trust someone unless they know each other for some time.Thus the idea of pure business relation seems odd in East which is a normal thing in West. The reason for such cultural attitude is the status of economies in the East and West. The third world countries have under developed economies; and these societies are mix of socialistic and capitalist systems. And business is normally done in traditional ways long forgotten in the West. It’s natural in such environment to have lack of trust in e-commerce environment. Creating information societies where people are made aware of internet and the power of e-commerce would be one step in this directionThere may be come some improvement by opening up information; however cultural traits cannot be solved only by making information available. Cultural habits are developed over the course of centuries that will not wither away simply by informing people about internet. The Western societies have been developed through many centuries; which cannot take place over night in the east. In order to develop e-commerce environment; countries like Egypt need to invest in many areas; such as infrastructure, education and more importantly to develop consumer based economy.People in Egypt (and countries like Egypt) are under paid; wealth is very scarce to produce. In such environment people trust only those; whom they know personally, rather than trusting someone online which they have never met or seen . It would take lot of effort by developing countries to work on their economies making them more market oriented and create businesses and opportunities; only then it would be possible to change cultural habits.

Crime Data Comparison Essay

This week in class we were asked to choose two metropolitan areas with different data and write a paper comparing the occurrence of the offense in the selected areas. We were asked to identify the number of occurrences reported to the police for each area, and address the following questions which area had more reported incidents? What were the rates of the crime for each area? Did the rates change over time in either area? What factors might explain the differences in the rates? The information will be presented as it appears above. New York and New Jersey are two metropolitan areas that have had a lot of crime both high profile media grabbing attention and low profile everyday crime occurrences. Therefore these two metro areas can provide for very good demographical crime data as well as have a good base to study from due to the high crime rates in both areas. As such this paper will be comparing forcible rape crime data from both areas to see what is happening in this particular field. So with looking at the FBI.gov web site and looking for info on these two areas and the categories forcible rape it is very clear that this is a very big crime in both areas in new jersey the total for 2011 is 1,006 rape case which the year before in 2010 was at 981 cases which is a 2.5 % increase in this crime. In New York where this crime is a lot higher in totals 2,752 which is 1.6 % less than in 2010’s 2,797 cases. With this data we can see a few things happening here for one we can see that New York has a drop in rap e cases in one year and that New Jersey has increased in this crime, and this could be due to a number of reasons. We know that the two states are almost one in the same and that many people who work in New York live in New Jersey which could mean that these cases could involve residents from both areas and so both would have possibly been reported to. We could speculate that New Jersey has a less severe punishment than New York for rape crime and so the criminals would go to that area to commit the crime due to a less harsh punishment if caught. Another factor on this could be to release times of prisoners within the state that may go to metro areas and commit crimes; this could be a very real factor to consider due to the likely hood of violent criminals repeating their crimes. At any rate not just one factor is the most likely reason as to why we see a drop in New York and an increase in New Jersey. The probability that it has to do with most of if not all stated factors is very real, especially since rape is not a crime that can be predicted nor really deter able unfortunately. And with both metro areas having such high populations it is also possible that many cases were never reported, which is why New York and New Jersey both estimate a total as well as keep records for the actual total. In New York they had an estimate of 2,972 rape case that’s almost three hundred unreported rapes that may have happened. So with knowing that the actual rape cases reported versus the estimated total one could see that even though the statistics are going down and it may look like the crime rate in an area is going down you would still need to see the estimated totals and compare to see what could be unreported and unknown. With the info we have and the estimates on it as well it is clear that although I may appear that New York is getting a handle on its rape crime it may not be as well off as it appears and although New Jersey has had an increase in rape cases it also has lowered its estimate which could be a good sign or bad and unfortunately that is the way crime an statistics go ever changing and adapting. References Uniform Crime Report. (n.d). Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-4

History of Digital Computer

The History of Digital Computers B. RANDELL Computing Laboratory, University of Newcastle upon Tyne This account describes the history of the development of digital computers, from the work of Charles Babbage to the earliest electronic stored program computers, It has been prepared for Volume 3 of â€Å"l’Histoire Generale des Techniques,† and is in the main based on the introductory text written by the author for the book â€Å"The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers† (Springer Verlag, 1973). . Charles Babbage THE first electronic digital computers were completed in the late 1940’s. In most cases their developers were unaware that nearly all the important functional characteristics of these computers had been invented over a hundred years earlier by Charles Babbage. It was in 1821 that the English mathematician Charles Babbage became interested in the possibility of mechanising the computation and printing of mathematical tables.He successfully constructed a small machine, which he called a â€Å"difference engine,† capable of automatically generating successive values of simple algebraic functions by means of the method of finite differences. This encouraged him to plan a full-scale machine, and to seek financial backing from the British government. During the next 12 years both Babbage and the government poured considerable sums of money into the attempt at building his Difference Engine.However the project, which called for the construction of six interlinked adding mechanisms, each capable of adding two multiple-digit decimal numbers, together with an automatic printing mechanism, was considerably beyond the technological capabilities of the era – indeed it has been claimed that the efforts expended on the Difference Engine were more than justified simply by the improvements they generated in mechanical engineering equipment and practice.Although Babbage’s plans for a Difference Engine were somewha t premature, the basic scheme was vindicated when in 1843, inspired by their knowledge of his work, George and Edvard Scheutz successfully demonstrated a working prototype difference engine. A final version of this model was completed 10 years later, with financial assistance from the Swedish government. Several other difference engines ere constructed in the decades that followed, but such machines never achieved the importance of more conventional calculating machines, and when multi-register accounting machines became available in the 1920’s it was found that these could be used essentially as difference engines. However Babbage’s ideas soon progressed far beyond that of a special-purpose calculating machine – in fact almost as soon as he started work on his Difference Engine he became dissatisfied with its limitations.In particular he wished to avoid the need to have the highest order of difference constant, in order to be able to use the machine directly fo r transcendental as well as algebraic functions. In 1834 Babbage started active work on these matters, and on problems such as division and the need to speed up the part of the addition mechanism which dealt with the assimilation of carry digits. He developed several very ingenious methods of carry assimilation, but the time savings so obtainable would have been at the cost of a considerable amount of complex machinery.This led Babbage to realise the advantages of having a single centralised arithmetic mechanism, the â€Å"mill,† separate from the â€Å"figure axes,† i. e. , columns of discs which acted merely as storage locations rather than accumulators. Babbage’s first idea for controlling the sequencing of the various component mechanisms of the engine was to use â€Å"barrels,† i. e. , rotating pegged cylinders of the sort used in musical automata. He first planned to use a set of subsidiary barrels, with over-all control of the machine being specifi ed by a large central barrel with exchangeable pegs.However in June 1836 he took the major step of adopting a punched card mechanism, of the kind found in Jacquard looms, in place of the rather limited and cumbersome central barrel. He did so in the realisation that the â€Å"formulae† which specified the computation that the machine was to perform could therefore be of almost unbounded extent, and that it would be a simple matter to change from the use of one formula to another.Normally formula cards, each specifying an arithmetic operation to be performed, were to be read by the Jacquard mechanism in sequence, but Babbage also envisaged means whereby this sequence could be broken and then recommenced at an earlier or later card in the sequence. Moreover he allowed the choice of the next card which was to be used to be influenced by the partial results that the machine had obtained.These provisions allowed him to claim that computations of indefinite complexity could be perf ormed under the control of comparatively small sets of formula cards. Babbage talked at one time of having a store consisting of no less than 1000 figure axes, each capable of holding a signed 40-digit decimal number, and planned to provide for reading numbers from cards into the store, and for punching or printing the values of numbers held in the store.The movement of numbers between the mill and the store was to be controlled by a sequence of â€Å"variable cards,† each specifying which particular figure axis was involved. Therefore an arithmetic operation whose operands were to be obtained from the store and whose result was to be returned to the store would be specified by an operation card and several variable cards. He apparently intended these different kinds of control cards to be in separate sequences, read by separate Jacquard mechanisms.Thus in the space of perhaps 3 years Babbage had arrived at the concept of a general purpose digital computer consisting of a sto re, arithmetic unit, punched card input and output, and a card-controlled sequencing mechanism that provided iteration and conditional branching. Moreover although he continued to regard the machine, which he later came to call the Analytical Engine, as being principally for the construction of mathematical tables, he had a very clear grasp of the conceptual advances he had made.Basing his claim on the unbounded number of operation and variable cards that could be used to control the machine, the ease with which complicated conditional branches could be built from a sequence of simple ones, and the fact that automatic input and output, and multiple precision arithmetic, were provided, he stated that â€Å". . . it appears that the whole of the conditions which enable a finite machine to make calculations of unlimited extent are fulfilled in the Analytical Engine . . . . I have converted the infinity of space, which was required by the conditions of the problem, into the infinity of time. Because separate, but associated, sequences of cards were needed to control the Analytical Engine the concept of a program as we know it now does not appear very c1early in contemporary descriptions of the machine. However there is evidence that Babbage had realised the fact that the information punched on the cards which controlled the engine could itself have been manipulated by an automatic machine-for example he suggested the possibility of the Analytical Engine itself being used to assist in the preparation of lengthy sequences of control cards.Indeed in the description of the use of the Analytical Engine written by Lady Lovelace, in collaboration with Babbage, there are passages which would appear to indicate that it had been realised that an Analytical Engine was fully capable of manipulating symbolic as well as arithmetical quantities. Probably Babbage himself realised that the complete Analytical Engine was impractical to build, but he spent much of the rest of his l ife designing and redesigning mechanisms for the machine.The realisation of his dream had to await the development of a totally new technology, and an era when the considerable finances and facilities required for an automatic computer would be made available, the need at last being widely enough appreciated. He was a century ahead of his time, for as one of the pioneers of the modern electronic digital computer has written: â€Å"Babbage was moving in a world of logical design and system architecture, and was familiar with and had solutions for problems that were not to be discussed in the literature for another 100 years. †He died in 1871, leaving an immense collection of engineering drawings and documents, but merely a small portion of the Analytical Engine, consisting of an addition and a printing mechanism, whose assembly was completed by his son, Henry Babbage. This machine and Babbage’s engineering drawings are now in the Science Museum, London. 2. Babbageâ€⠄¢s direct successors Some years’ after Babbage’s death his son Henry Babbage recommenced work on the construction of a mechanical calculating machine, basing his efforts on the designs his father had made for the Mill of the Analytical Engine.This work was started in 1888 and carried on very intermittently. It was completed only in about 1910 when the Mill, which incorporated a printing mechanism, was demonstrated at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. By this date however the work of a little-known successor to Charles Babbage, an Irish accountant named Percy Ludgate, was already well advanced. Ludgate started work in 1903 at the age of 20 on an entirely novel scheme for performing arithmetic on decimal numbers.Decimal digits were to be represented by the lateral position of a sliding metal rod, rather than the angular position of a geared disc. The basic operation provided was multiplication, which used a complicated mechanism for calculating the two-digit products resulting from multiplying pairs of decimal digits. together. The scheme involved first transforming the digits into a form of logarithm, adding the logarithms together, and then converting the result back into a two-digit sum.This scheme is quite unlike any known to have been used in earlier mechanical calculators, or for that matter since, although there had been several calculating machines constructed that used built-in multiplication tables to obtain two-digit products – the earliest known of these was that invented by Bollee in 1887. It is in fact difficult to see any advantages to Ludgate’s logarithmic scheme, although his form of number representation is reminiscent of that used in various mechanical calculating devices in the following decades.So striking are the differences between Ludgate’s and Babbage’s ideas for mechanical arithmetic that there is no reason to dispute Ludgate’s statement that he did not learn of Babbageâ€℠¢s prior work until the later stages of his own. It seems likely that Babbage was the eventual inspiration for Ludgate to investigate the provision of a sequence control mechanism. Here he made an advance over the rather awkward system that Babbage had planned, involving separate sets of operation and variable cards.Instead his machine was to have been controlled by a single perforated paper tape, each row of which represented an instruction consisting of an operation code and four address fields. Control transfers simply involved moving the tape the appropriate number of rows forwards or backwards. Moreover he also envisaged the provision of what we would now call subroutines, represented by sequences of perforations around the circumference of special cylinders-one such cylinder was to be provided The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications 2 for division.The machine was also to be controllable from a keyboard, a byproduct of whose operation would be a perforated tape which could then be used to enable the sequence of manually controlled operations to be repeated automatically. Ludgate estimated that his Analytical Machine would be capable of multiplying two twenty-digit numbers in about 10 seconds, and that, in considerable contrast to Babbage’s Analytical Engine, it would be portable. However there is no evidence that he ever tried to construct the machine, which he apparently worked on alone, in his spare time.He died in 1922, and even if at this time his plans for the Analytical Machine still existed there is now no trace of them, and our knowledge of the machine depends almost entirely on the one description of it that he published. The next person who is known to have followed in the footsteps of Babbage and to have worked on the problems of designing an analytical engine was Leonardo Torres y Quevedo. Torres was born in the province of Santander in Spain in 1852.Although qualified as a civil engineer he devoted his career to scientific re search, and in particular to the design and construction of an astonishing variety of calculating devices and automata. He gained great renown, particularly in France and in Spain, where he became President of the Academy of Sciences of Madrid, and where following his death in 1936 an institute for scientific research was named after him. Torres first worked on analog calculating devices, including equation solvers and integrators.In the early 1900’s he built various radio-controlled devices, including a torpedo and a boat which, according to the number of pulses it received, could select between various rudder positions and speeds, and cause a flag to be run up and down a mast. In 1911 he made and successfully demonstrated the first of two chess-playing automata for the end game of king and rook against king. The machine was fully automatic, with electrical sensing of the positions of the pieces on the board and a mechanical arm to move its own pieces. The second machine was built in 1922, and used magnets underneath the board to move the pieces. ) In all this work, he was deliberately exploiting the new facilities that electromechanical techniques offered, and challenging accepted ideas as to the limitations of machines. He picked on Babbage’s Analytical Engine as an important and interesting technical challenge, and in 1914 published a paper incorporating detailed schematic designs for a suitable set of electro-mechanical components.These included devices for storing, comparing and multiplying numbers, and were accompanied by a discussion of what is now called floating point number representation. He demonstrated the use of the devices in a design for a special-purpose program-controlled calculator. The program was to be represented by areas of conductive material placed on the surface of a rotating drum, and incorporated a means for specifying conditional branching. Torres clearly never intended to construct a machine to his design, but 6 yea rs later he built, and successfully demonstrated, a typewriter-controlled calculating machine primarily to demonstrate that an electromechanical analytical engine was completely feasible. He in fact never did build an analytical engine, although he designed, and in many cases built, various other digital devices including two more calculating machines, an automatic weighing machine, and a machine for playing a game somewhat like the game of Nim. However there seems little reason to doubt that, should the need have been sufficiently pressing, Torres would indeed have built a complete analytical engine.In the event, it was not until the 1939-1945 war that the desirability of largescale fully automatic calculating machines became so clear that the necessary environment was created for Babbage’s concept to become a reality. Before this occurred there is known to have been at least one further effort at designing an analytical engine. This was by a Frenchman, Louis Couffignal, who was motivated mainly by a desire to reduce the incidence of errors in numerical computations.He was familiar with the work of Babbage and Torres y Quevedo but, in contrast to their designs, proposed to use binary number representation. The binary digits of stored numbers were to be represented by the lateral position of a set of parallel bars controlled by electro-magnets. The various arithmetic operations were to be performed by relay networks, the whole machine being controlled by perforated tapes. Couffignal apparently had every intention of building this machine, in association with the Logabax Company, but presumably because of the war never did so.However after the war he was in charge of an electronic computer project for the Institut Blaise Pascal, the design study and construction of the machine being in the hands of the Logabax Company. With Couffignal’s pre-war plans, the line of direct succession to Babbage’s Analytical Engine seems to have come to an end. Most of the wartime computer projects were apparently carried out in ignorance of the extent to which many of the problems that had to be dealt with had been tackled by Babbage over a century earlier. However in some cases there is clear evidence that nowledge of Babbage’s work was an influence on the wartime pioneers, in particular Howard Aiken, originator of the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, and William Phillips, an early proponent of binary calculation, and various other influential people, including Vannevar Bush and L. J. Comrie, were also well aware of his dream. 3. The contribution of the punched card industry An initially quite separate thread of activity leading to the development of the modern computer originated with the invention of the punched card tabulating system.The capabilities of Herman Hollerith’s equipment, first used on a large scale for the 1890 US National Census, were soon extended considerably. The original equipment allowed cards to hold binary information representing the answers to a Census questionnaire. These cards could be tabulated, one by one, using a machine which sensed the presence of holes in the card electrically and could be wired to count the number of cards processed in which particular holes or combinations of holes had been punched. A device could be attached to such a tabulator which assisted the manual sorting of cards into a number of separate sequences.Within 10 years automatic card handling mechanisms, which greatly increased the speed of machine operation, and addition units, which enabled card tabulators to sum decimal numbers punched on cards, had been provided. The system soon came into widespread use in the accounting departments of various commercial organisations, as well as being used for statistical tabulations in many countries of the world. After the 1900 US Census relations between Hollerith and the Census Bureau deteriorated, and the Bureau began to manufacture its own equ ipment for use in the 1910 Census.The person in charge of this work was James Powers who circumvented Hollerith’s patents by producing a mechanical card reading apparatus. He retained the patent rights to his inventions and formed his own company which eventually merged with Remington Rand in 1927. In 1911 Hollerith sold his own company, the Tabulating Machine Company, which he had formed in 1896, and it was shortly afterwards merged with two other companies to form the Computing-TabulatingRecording Company. This company which was under the direction of Thomas J.Watson from 1914 became the International Business Machines Corporation in 1924. During the 1920’s and 1930’s punched card systems developed steadily, aided no doubt by the stimulus of competition, not only in the USA but also in Britain, where the Hollerith and Powers-based systems continued to be marketed under the names of their original inventors, while in France a third manufacturer, Compagnie Machi nes Bull, was also active. Unfortunately the people involved in this work did not in general publish technical papers and their work has received little public recognition.Thus full appreciation of the contribution of IBM development engineers, such as J. W. Bryce, one of the most prolific inventors of his era, will probably have to await an analysis of the patent literature. One inventor whose work has, however, been documented is Gustav Tauschek, a self-taught Viennese engineer, with more than 200 patents in the computing field to his credit. While working for Rheinische Metallund Maschinenfabrik he designed and built a punched card electromechanical accounting machine.His other patents, many of which were filed whilst he was under contract to IBM during the 1930’s, also included a â€Å"reading-writing-calculating machine† which used photocells to compare printed input characters with templates held on photographic film, a number storage device using magnetised stee l plates, and an electromechanical accounting machine designed for use in small banks capable of storing the records of up to 10 000 accounts. By the 1930’s printing tabulators were available which worked at approximately 100 cards per minute, and there were sorters which worked at 400 cards per minute.The machines were controlled by fairly intricate plugboards, but arithmetic and logical computations involving sequences of operations of any great complexity were carried out by repeated processing of sets of cards, under the direction of operators. Various attempts were made to supplement the functional capabilities of punched card systems by linking together otherwise independent machines. One such system, the Synchro-Madas machine, incorporated a typewriter/accounting machine, an automatic calculating machine and an automatic card punch.These were linked together so that a single action by the operator sitting at the typewriter/accounting machine would control several opera tions on the different machines. One other system involving a set of inter-linked card machines, although very different in concept and scale from the Synchro-Madas machine, is worth mentioning. This is the Remote-control Accounting system which was experimented with in a Pittsburgh department store, also in the mid-1930’s. The system involved 250 terminals connected by telephone lines to 20 Powers card punch/tabulators and 15 on-line typewriters.The terminals transmitted data from punched merchandise tags which were used to produce punched sales record cards, later used for customer billing. The typewriter terminals were used for credit authorisation purposes. The intended peak transaction rate was 9000 per hour. Even during the 1920’s punched card systems were used not only for accounting and the compilation of statistics, but also for complex statistical calculations. However the first important scientific application of punched card systems was made by L.J. Comrie in 1929. Comrie was Superintendent of HM Nautical Almanac Office until 1936, and then founded the Scientific Computing Service. He made a speciality of putting commercial computing machinery to scientific use, and introduced Hollerith equipment to the Nautical Almanac Office. His calculations of the future positions of the Moon, which involved the punching of half a million cards, stimulated many other scientists to exploit the possibilities of punched card systems. One such scientist was Wallace J.Eckert, an astronomer at Columbia University, which already had been donated machines for a Statistical Laboratory by IBM in 1929, including the â€Å"Statistical Calculator,† a specially developed tabulator which was the forerunner of the IBM Type 600 series of multiplying punches, and of the mechanisms used in the Harvard Mark I machine. With assistance from IBM in 1934 Eckert set up a scientific computing laboratory in the Columbia Astronomy Department, a laboratory which was la ter to become the Thomas J.Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau. In order to facilitate the use of his punched card equipment Eckert developed a centralised control mechanism, linked to a numerical tabulator, a summary punch and a multiplying punch, so that a short cycle of different operations could be performed at high speed. The control mechanism which was based on a stepping switch enabled many calculations, even some solutions 4 The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications of differential equations, to be performed completely automatically.The potential of a system of inter-connected punched card machines, controlled by a fully general-purpose sequencing mechanism, and the essential similarity of such a system to Babbage’s plans for an Analytical Engine, were discussed in an article published by Vannevar Bush in 1936. Bush was at this time already renowned for his work on the first differential analyser, and during the war held the influential position of Director o f the US Office of Scientific Research and Development.In fact an attempt was made to build such a system of inter-connected punched card machines at the Institut fur Praktische Mathematik of the Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt, in Germany during the war. The plans called for the inter-connection of a standard Hollerith multiplier and tabulators, and specially constructed divider and function generators, using a punched tape sequence control mechanism. Work was abandoned on the project following a destructive air raid in September 1944. However, by this stage, in the United States much more ambitious efforts were being made to apply the expertise of punched card equipment designers.The efforts originated in 1937 with a proposal by Howard Aiken of Harvard University that a large-scale scientific calculator be constructed by inter-connecting a set of punched card machines via a master control panel. This would be plugged so as to govern the transmission of numerical operands and the sequencing of arithmetic operations. Through Dr. Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, Aiken became acquainted with Wallace Eckert’s punched card installation at Columbia University.These contacts helped Aiken to persuade IBM to undertake the task of developing and building a machine to his basic design. For IBM, J. W. Bryce assigned C. D. Lake, F. E. Hamilton and B. M. Durfee to the task. Aiken later acknowledged these three engineers as co-inventors of the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or Harvard Mark I as it became known. The machine was built at the IBM development laboratories at Endicott and was demonstrated there in January 1943 before being shipped to Harvard, where it became operational in May 1944.In August of that year IBM, in the person of Thomas J. Watson, donated the machine to Harvard where it was used initially for classified work for the US Navy. The design of the Harvard Mark I followed the original proposals by Aiken fairly close ly, but it was built using a large number of the major components used in the various types of punched card machines then manufactured, rather than from a set of complete machines themselves. It incorporated 72 â€Å"storage counters† each of which served as both a storage location, and as a complete adding and subtracting machine.Each counter consisted of 24 electromechanical counter wheels and could store a signed 23digit decimal number. A special multiply/divide unit, and units for obtaining the value of previously computed functions held on perforated tape, and for performing interpolation, were provided together with input/output equipment such as card readers and punches, and typewriters. The various mechanisms and counter wheels were all driven and synchronised by a single gearconnected mechanical system extending along nearly the entire length of the calculator.A main sequence control mechanism incorporating a punched tape reader governed the operation of the machine. Each horizontal row on the tape had space for three groups of eight holes, known as the A, B and C groups. Together these specified a single instruction of the form â€Å"Take the number out of unit A, deliver it to unit B, and start operation C. † Somewhat surprisingly, in view of Aiken’s knowledge of Babbage’s work and writings, no provision was made originally for conditional branching.As it was, such provision was only made later when a subsidiary sequence control mechanism was built at Harvard and incorporated into the machine. The Harvard Mark I was a massive machine over 50 feet long, built on a lavish scale. Being largely mechanical its speed was somewhat limited – for example multiplication took 6 seconds – but it continued in active use at Harvard until 1959. It has an important place in the history of computers although the long-held belief that it was the world’s first operational programcontrolled computer was proved to be fals e, once the details of Zuse’s wartime work in Germany became known.It marked a major step by IBM towards full involvement in the design of general-purpose computers and, with ENIAC and the Bell Telephone Laboratories Series, represents the starting point of American computer developments. After completion of the Mark I, Aiken and IBM pursued independent paths. Aiken, still distrustful of the reliability of electronic components, moved to electromagnetic relays for the construction of the Harvard Mark II, another paper-tape-sequenced calculator.This machine had an internal store which could hold about 100 dccimal floating point numbers. One of the most interesting aspects of the machine was that it could be operated either as a single computer or as two separate ones. The complete system incorporated four of each type of input/output device, namely sequence tape readers, data tape readers and punches, numerical function tape readers and output printers. It also had multiple ar ithmetic facilities, including two adders and four multipliers (taking 0. 7 second) which could all be used simultaneously.Detailed design of the machine, which was intended for the US Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia, began at Harvard early in 1945, and the machine was completed in 1947. Afterwards Aiken and his colleagues went on to design the Mark III, an electronic computer with magnetic drum storage, completed in 1950, and the Mark IV, which incorporated 200 magnetic core shift registers, completed in 1952. The designers of IBM’s next machine, the Pluggable Sequence Relay Calculator, included two of the Harvard Mark I’s design team, namely C. D. Lake and B. M.Durfee, but the machine in fact had more in common with IBM’s earlier calculating punches than with the Mark I; like the punches it was controlled using plugboard-specified sequencing, rather than by a sequence control tape of essentially unlimited length. Its relay construction resulted in its basic operation speed being considerably faster than the Mark I, although it lacked the Mark I’s ease and flexibility of programming, demanding instead the kind of detailed design of parallel subsequencing that one sees nowadays at the microprogramming level of some computers.Great stress was raid by the designers on the efficient use of punched card input/output, and it was claimed that in many cases, where other machines’ internal storage capacity proved inadequate, the IBM relay calculators could outperform even the contemporary electronic computers. Several machines were built, the first of which was delivered in December 1944 to the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and two were installed at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory that IBM had set up at Columbia University under the directorship of Wallace Eckert.The Relay Calculator was followed by the giant IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, a machine which was very much in the tradition of the Mark I. Wal lace Eckert was responsible for the logical organisation of the machine, with Frank Hamilton being the chief engineer on the project. The design was a compromise between Eckert’s wish, for performance reasons, to use electronic components to the full, and Hamilton’s preference for electro-mechanical relays, on grounds of reliability. As a result vacuum tubes were used for the arithmetic unit, the control circuitry, and the 8 word high-speed store, relays being used elsewhere.In addition to the 8 word store there was a 150 word random access electro-magnetic store and storage for 20000 numbers in the form of punched tapes. Numbers would be read from the electro-magnetic store, or in sequence from the punched tape store, at the speed of the multiplier, i. e. , every 20 milliseconds. The design was started in 1945, and the machine was built in great secrecy at Endicott, before being moved to New York City, where it was publicly unveiled at an elaborate dedication ceremony in January 1948. The most important aspect of the SSEC, credited to R. R.Seeber, was that it could perform arithmetic on, and then execute, stored instructions – it was almost certainly the first operational machine with these capabilities. This led to IBM obtaining some very important patents, but the machine as a whole was soon regarded as somewhat anachronistic and was dismantled in 1952. It had however provided IBM with some valuable experience – for example, Hamilton and some of his engineering colleagues went on to design the highly successful IBM 650, and many of the SSEC programmers later became members of the IBM 701 programming group.Finally, mention should be made of one other machine manufactured by IBM which can be classed as a precursor to the modern electronic digital computer. This was the Card Programmed Calculator, a machine which along with its predecessors now tends to be overshadowed by the SSEC. Like the Pluggable Sequence Relay Calculator, the C PC can trace its origins to the IBM 600 series of multiplying punches. In 1946 IBM announced the Type 603, the first production electronic calculator. The IBM 603, which incorporated 300 valves, was developed from an experimental multiplier designed at Endicott under the direction of R.L. Palmer in 1942. One hundred machines were sold, and then IBM replaced it with the Type 604, a plugboardcontrolled electronic calculator, which provided conditional branching but, lacking backward jumps, no means of constructing program loops. Deliveries of the 604, which incorporated over 1400 valves, started in 1948 and within the next 10 years over 5000 were installed. In 1948 a 604 was coupled to a type 402 accounting machine by Northrop Aircraft Company, in order to provide the 604 with increased capacity and with printing facilities. This idea was taken up by IBM, and formed the basis of the CPC.Nearly 700 CPC’s were built, and this machine played a vital role in providing computing pow er to many installations in the USA until stored program electronic computers became commercially available on a reasonable scale. In the years that followed the introduction of the CPC, IBM continued to develop its range of electronic calculators and, starting in 1952 with the IBM 701, an electronic computer in the tradition of von Neumann’s IAS machine, took its first steps towards achieving its present dominant position amongst electronic computer manufacturers. . Konrad Zuse Konrad Zuse started to work on the development of mechanical aids to calculation as early as 1934, at the age of 24. He was studying civil engineering at the Technische Hochschule, Berlin-Charlottenburg, and sought some means of relief from the tedious calculations that had to be performed. His first idea had been to design special forms to facilitate ordinary manual calculation, but then he decided to try to mechanise the operation.Continuing to use the special layouts that he had designed for his fo rms, he investigated representing numerical data by means of perforations, and the use of a hand-held sensing device which could communicate the data over an electrical cable to an automatic calculating machine. The idea then arose of using a mechanical register rather than perforated cards, and, realising that the layout was irrelevant, Zuse started to develop a general purpose mechanical store, whose locations were addressed numerically.By 1936 he had the basic design of a floating point binary computer, controlled by a program tape consisting of a sequence of instructions, each of which specified an operation code, two operand addresses and a result address. Thus, apparently quite independently of earlier work by Babbage and his successors on analytical engines, Zuse had very quickly reached the point of having a design for a general-purpose program-controlled computer, although the idea of conditional branching was lacking.More importantly, even though the various basic The Inst itute of Mathematics and its Applications 6 ideas that his design incorporated had, it now turns out, been thought of earlier (i. e. , binary mechanical arithmetic (Leibniz), program control (Babbage), instruction formats with numerical storage addresses (Ludgate) and floating point number representations (Torres y Quevedo)), Zuse’s great achievement was to turn these ideas into reality. Zuse had considerable trouble finding sponsors willing to finance the building of his machine.Despite his financial difficulties his first machine, the Z1, which was of entirely mechanical construction was completed in 1938, but it proved unreliable in operation. He then started to construct a second, fixed-point binary, machine which incorporated the 16 word mechanical binary store of the Z1, but was otherwise built from second-hand telephone relays. Although the Z2 computer was completed it was inadequate for any practical use. However by this time a colleague, Helmut Schreyer, was already working with Zuse on the problem of producing an electronic version of the Z1.This led to the construction of a small 10 place binary arithmetic unit, with approximately 100 valves, but proposals that Schreyer and Zuse made to the German government for a 1500 valve electronic computer were rejected and the work was discontinued in 1942. Earlier, in 1939, Zuse was called up for military service, but managed to get released after about a year, and for the first time received significant government backing for his plans. This enabled him to build the Z3 computer, a binary machine with a 64 word store, all built out of telephone relays.This computer, since it was operational in 1941, is believed to have been the world’s first general-purpose program-controlled computer. It incorporated units for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square root, using a floating point number representation with a sign bit, a 7-bit exponent and a 14-bit mantissa. Input was via a manu al keyboard and output via a set of lights, in each case with automatic binary/decimal conversion, and the machine was controlled by a perforated tape carrying single address instructions, i. . , instructions specifying one operand, and an operation. In addition to his series of general-purpose computers, Zuse built two special-purpose computers, both used for calculations concerning aircraft wing profiles. The first of these was in use for 2 years at the Henschel Aircraft Works, before being destroyed through war damage. Both computers had fixed programs, wired on to rotary switches, and performed calculations involving addition, subtraction and multiplication by constant factors.Soon after completion of the Z3, the design of an improved version, the Z4, was started. This was mainly electro-mechanical but incorporated a purely mechanical binary store similar to that which had been used for the Zl and Z2 machines. The partially completed Z4 was the only one of Zuse’s machines to survive the war – indeed it eventually was completed and gave years of successful service at the Technische Hochschule, Zurich. The Z4 was inspected shortly after the war by R. C. Lyndon, whose report on the machine for the US Office f Naval Research was published in 1947. At this stage the Z4 had only manual input and output, and no means of conditional branching, although it was planned to add four tape readers and two tape punches, and facilities for repeating programs and for choosing between alternate subprograms. The machine was housed in the cellar of a farmhouse in the little village of Hopferau in Bavaria, and was not fully operational, but the mechanical store and various arithmetic operations and their automatic sequencing were successfully demonstrated to Lyndon.His report, although it gives a fairly full description of the Z4 (with the exception of the mechanical store, which he was not allowed to examine in detail), made virtually no mention of Zuse’s earlier work. Indeed it was many years before any other English language accounts of Zuse’s work were published, and Zuse’s rightful place in the chronology of computer development became at all widely appreciated. 5. Bell Telephone Laboratories The potentialities of telephone equipment for the construction of digital calculation devices were not realised for many years.The first automatic telephone exchange, which used the step-by-step or Strowger switch, was installed in 1892. As early as 1906 Molina devised a system for translating the pulses representing the dialled decimal digits into a more convenient number system. Exchanges based mainly on the use of electromechanical relays started to come into use at the turn of the century, the earliest successful centralised automatic exchanges dating from about 1914. However, from the late 1920’s various different calculating devices were developed using telephone equipment.Perhaps the most spectacular of these was the automatic totalisator. Totalisator, or â€Å"pari-mutuel,† betting became legal on British race courses in July 1929. Development of fully automatic totalisators consisting of ticket-issuing machines situated in various parts of the race course, a central calculating apparatus, and display boards which indicated the number and total value of bets made on each horse, and on the race as a whole, was already well under way.There were several rival systems. The Hamilton Totalisator and the totalisator produced by the British Automatic Totalisator Company were fully electrical, both as regards the calculations performed and the operation of the display boards, whereas the Lightning Totalisator used electrical impulses from remote ticket machines only to release steel balls which fell through tubes and actuated a mechanical adding apparatus.In January 1930 the Racecourse Betting Control Board demonstrated at Thirsk Racecourse a new standard electric totalisator supplied by Bri tish Thompson Houston, built from Strowger switches. This machine which was transportable from racecourse to racecourse could accumulate bets on up to six horses at a maximum rate of 12 000 per minute. The machine had in fact been designed in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1928 but the first complete machine to be used in the USA was installed by the American Totalisator Company at Arlington Park nly in 1933. In succeeding years much more sophisticated totalisators, involving hundreds of remote ticket-issuing machines, were used at racecourses all over USA, and it was not until many years after the advent of the electronic computer that one was used as a replacement for the central calculating apparatus of the totalisator. One early little-known design for a calculating machine to be built from telephone relays was that of Bernard Weiner in Czechoslovakia in 1923.Weiner, in association with the Vitkovice Iron Works, went on during the 1930’s to design a more powerful automatic calcu lator. He did not survive the war, and nothing is known about the results of this work. Other early work was done by Nicoladze who in 1928 designed a multiplier based on the principle of Genaille’s rods. (These were a non-mechanical aid to multiplication which enabled a person to read off the product of a multidigit number by a single digit number. Four years later Hamann described not only various different styles of relay-based multiplier, but also a device for solving sets of simultaneous linear equations, and shortly afterwards Weygandt demonstrated a prototype determinant evaluator, capable of dealing with 3 x 3 determinants. Undoubtedly in the years that followed many other digital calculating devices were developed based on telephone relay equipment, particularly during the war for such military applications as ballistics calculations and cryptanalysis – indeed, as mentioned earlier, some of Zuse’s machines made extensive use of telephone relays.It is per haps a little surprising that it was not until 1937 that Bell Telephone Laboratories investigated the design of calculating devices, although from about 1925 the possibility of using relay circuit techniques for such purposes was well accepted there. However, in 1937 George Stibitz started to experiment with relays, and drew up circuit designs for addition, multiplication and division. At first he concentrated on binary arithmetic, together with automatic decimal-binary and binarydecimal conversion, but later turned his attention to a binary-coded decimal number representation.The project became an official one when, prompted by T. C. Fry, Stibitz started to design a calculator capable of multiplying and dividing complex numbers, which was intended to fill a very practical need, namely to facilitate the solution of problems in the design of filter networks, and so started the very important Bell Telephone Laboratories Series of Relay Computers. In November 1938, S. B. Williams took over responsibility for the machine’s development and together with Stibitz refined the design of the calculator, whose construction was started in April and completed in October of 1939.The calculator, which became known as the â€Å"Complex Number Computer† (often shortened to â€Å"Complex Computer,† and as other calculators were built, the â€Å"Model I†), began routine operation in January 1940. Within a short time it was modified so as to provide facilities for the addition and subtraction of complex numbers, and was provided with a second, and then a third, teletype control, situated in remote locations. It remained in daily use at Bell Laboratories until 1949.The Complex Computer was publicly demonstrated for the first time in September 1940 by being operated in its New York City location from a teletypewriter installed in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the occasion of a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, a demonstration that both John Mauc hly and Norbert Wiener attended. During 1939 and 1940 Stibitz started work on the idea of automatic sequencing and on the use of error-detecting codes. These ideas were not pursued actively until, a year or so later, the onset of the war rovided a strong stimulus and the necessary financial climate. They then formed the basis of the second of the Bell Laboratories relay calculators, the â€Å"Relay Interpolator. † This was a special-purpose tape-controlled device, with selfchecking arithmetic, designed to solve fire control problems, and was built for the National Defense Research Council, to which Stibitz had been lent by Bell Laboratories. Although mainly used for interpolation it was also used for a few problems in harmonic analysis, calculation of roots of polynomials and solution of differential equations.It became operational in September 1943, and after the war it was handed over to the US Naval Research Laboratory, where it was in use until 1961. The Model III relay c alculator, the â€Å"Ballistic Computer,† work on which started in 1942, was a much more complete realisation of Stibitz’s early plans for an automatic computer, and although once again intended for fire control problems was much more versatile than the Model II. It was tape-controlled, and had a tenregister store, a built-in multiplier (designed by E. L.Vibbard), and devices for performing automatic look-up of tables held on perforated paper tape. Perhaps most impressive was the fact that the machine was 100 per cent. self-checked. The machine was completed in June 1944, and remained in use until 1958. The Model IV relay calculator was little different from the Model III, and the series culminated in the Model V, a truly general-purpose program-controlled computer, complete with convenient conditional branching facilities. (The final member of the series, Model VI, was essentially just a simplified version of the Model V. Two copies of the Model V were built, the firs t being delivered in 1946 to the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics at Langley Field, Virginia, and the second in 1947 to the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, Maryland. With its multiple computing units, the Model V, which used floating point arithmetic, was what we would now call a multiprocessing system, and its â€Å"problem tapes† were the forerunners of the early simple batch-processing operating systems. Each of the two computing units comprising a complete system contained 15 storage registers.A single register could hold a floating point number consisting of a sign, a seven-decimal digit mantissa and a two-digit exponent. Decimal digits were stored in a bi-quinary form, using seven relays, and each register used a total of 62 relays. Each unit had independent provision for the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and for 8 The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications taking the square root of floating point numbers, and for printi ng or punching its results.In addition a large set of tape readers, intended for tapes of input data, tabulated functions and programs, and for the problem tapes which controlled the running of series of separate programs, were shared by the two computer units. These units normally functioned as independent computers, but for large problems would be arranged to work cooperatively. Although somewhat slow in execution, the Model V set new standards for reliability, versatility and ease of switching from one task to another, and in so doing must surely have had an important influence on the designers of the earliest round of general-purpose electronic computers.In later years, quite a number of relay calculators were constructed, in both the USA and Europe, even after the first stored program electronic computers became operational, but the importance of their role in the history of computers hardly matches that of the Bell Laboratories Model V and its contemporaries. 6. The advent of electronic computers The earliest known electronic digital circuit, a â€Å"trigger relay,† which involved a pair of valves in a circuit with two stable states and was an early form of flip-flop, was described by Eccles and Jordan in 1919.The next development that we know of was the use by WynnWilliams at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, of thyratrons in counting circuits including, in 1932, a â€Å"scale-of-two† (binary) counter. By the end of the decade quite a few papers had been published on electronic counters intended for counting impulses from GeigerMuller tubes used in nuclear physics experiments. WynnWilliams’ work had a direct influence on the ideas of William Phillips, who apparently in 1935 attempted to patent a binary electronic computing machine.He built a mechanical model, which still exists, of the intended electronic multiplication unit but no other details are presently known of his planned machine. The first known attempt to build an elect ronic digital calculating machine was begun by John V. Atanasoff in the mid-1930’s at Iowa State College where there had been an active interest in statistical applications using punched card equipment since the early 1920’s. As an applied mathematician Atanasoff had many problems requiring generalisations of existing methods of approximating solutions of linear operational equations.He first explored the use of analog techniques and with Lynn Hannum, one of his graduate students, developed the â€Å"Laplaciometer,† a device for solving Laplace’s equation in two dimensions with various boundary conditions. By 1935 the realisation of the sharp limitations of analog computing forced Atanasoff to digital methods. The disadvantages of mechanical techniques and his knowledge of electronics and of the work of Eccles and Jordan then led him to consider an electronic approach.He soon found that in these circumstances a base two number system would have great adva ntages. In 19361937 Atanasoff abandoned the Eccles-Jordan approach and conceived a system employing memory and logic circuits, whose details were worked out in 1938. He received a grant from Iowa State in 1939, and was joined by Clifford E. Berry. With Berry’s assistance a prototype computing element was built and operating by the autumn of that year. They then undertook the design and construction of a large machine intended for the solution of up to 30 simultaneous linear equations.At the heart of the machine there was a pair of rotating cylinders around the surface of which a set of small electrical condensers was placed. Each condenser could, by the direction of its charge, represent a binary digit; although the charge would leak away slowly, it was arranged that as the cylinders rotated the charge on each condenser was detected and reinforced at 1 second time intervals so that information could be stored for as long as required.The condensers were arranged so as to provi de two sets of 30 binary words, each consisting of 50 bits, the condensers corresponding to a single word being arranged in a plane perpendicular to the axis of the cylinders. The results of intermediate steps of a computation were to be punched in binary form on cards, for later re-input to the machine. In order that card punching and reading should be fast enough to keep pace with the computation, special devices were designed that made and detected holes in cards by means of electrical sparks.Ordinary input and output was to be via conventional punched cards, with the machine providing automatic binary/decimal conversions. The machine, with binary addition, subtraction and shifting as its basic arithmetic facilities, was designed to solve sets of simultaneous linear equations by the method of successive elimination of unknowns. The electronic part of the computer was operational but the binary card reader was still unreliable when in 1942 Atanasoff and Bcrry left Iowa State for w artime jobs, so that the machine was abandoned, never having seen actual use.In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s several groups started to investigate the use of digital electronic circuits as replacements for mechanical or electro-mechanical calculating devices, including several of the American business machine manufacturers such as IBM, whose work was described briefly above. The earliest known efforts at applying electronics to a general-purpose program-controlled computer were those undertaken by Schreyer and Zuse, also mentioned earlier.The next development which should be mentioned is the still classified series of electronic cryptanalytic machines that were designed and built in Britain during the war. The machines that are of particular interest, with respect to the development of electronic computers are the Colossi, the first of which was operational in late 1943, while by the end of the war ten had been installed. Each Colossus incorporated approximately 20 00 valves, and processed a punched data tape that was read at a speed of 5000 characters per second.Preset patterns that were to be compared against the input data were generated from stored component patterns. These components were stored in ring registers made of thyratrons and could be manually set by plug-in pins. The Colossi were developed by a team led by M. H. A. Newman. Alan Turing, who had been one of the main people involved in the design of an electro-mechanical predecessor to the Colossi, was apparently not directly associated with the new design, but with others provided the requirements that the machines were to satisfy.The comparative lack of technical details about the design of these machines makes it unreasonable to attempt more than a preliminary, and somewhat hesitant, assessment of the Colossi with respect to the modern digital computer. It would appear that the arithmetical, as opposed to logical, capabilities were minimal, involving only counting rather than g eneral addition or other operations. They did, however, have a certain amount of electronic storage. Although fully automatic, even to the extent of producing printed output, they were very much special-purpose machines, but ithin their field of specialisation the facilities provided by plug-boards and banks of switches afforded a considerable degree of flexibility; in fact several of the people involved in the project have since characterised the machines as being â€Å"program-controlled. † Their importance as cryptanalytic machines, which must have been immense, can only be inferred from the number of machines that were made and the honours bestowed on various members of the team after the end of the war; however, their importance with respect to the development of computers was twofold.They demonstrated the practicality of largescale electronic digital equipment, just as ENIAC did, on an even grander scale, approximately 2 years later. Furthermore, they were also a major source of the designers of some of the first post-war British computers, namely the Manchester machine, the MOSAIC, and the ACE at the National Physical Laboratory. Fascinating though they are, none of the efforts described so far comes near to matching the importance of the work at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, which led to the design of first the ENIAC and then the EDVAC computers.By 1942 the Moore School had, because of pressures of war, become closely associated with the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the US Army Ordnance Department, and the Moore School’s differential analyser was being used to supplement the work of the one at the Ballistic Research Laboratory on the production of ballistic tables. (The two analysers were identical and had been patterned on the original differential analyser invented by Vannevar Bush in 1930. ) One of the people who had worked with the analyser was John Mauchly, then an assistant professor at the Moore School.Mauchly was by this time well aware of what could be done with desk calculating machines and punched card equipment, although he was apparently unaware of the work Aiken was then doing on what became the Harvard Mark I, or of Babbage’s efforts 100 years earlier. He did however know of the work of Stibitz and had visited Iowa State in June 1941 in order to see Atanasoff’s special-purpose computer. Another person who worked on the Moore School differential analyser, and in fact made important improvements to it by replacing its mechanical amplifiers by partially electronic devices, was J. Presper Eckert, a research associate at the School.Eckert had met Mauchly in 1941, and it was their discussions about the possibility of surmounting the reliability problems of complex electronic devices that laid the groundwork for a memorandum that Mauchly wrote in August 1942. This proposed that an electronic digital computer be constructed for the purpose of solving numerical difference equations of the sort encountered in ballistics problems. Also at the Moore School, acting as a liaison officer for Colonel Paul N. Gillon of the office of the Chief of Ordnance, was Herman H. Goldstine, who before the war had been assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan.In early 1943 Goldstine and Gillon became interested in the possibility of using an electronic calculating machine for the preparation of firing and bombing tables. By this time Mauchly’s 1942 memorandum had been mislaid, and it had to be recreated from his secretary’s notes. The second version of the memorandum, together with more detailed plans drawn up by Mauchly and Eckert, was included in a report dated April 1943 which formed the basis for a contract between the University of Pennsylvania and the US Government to develop an electronic computer.A large team was assembled at the Moore School in order to design and build the computer under the supervisi on of J. G. Brainerd, with Eckert as chief engineer and Mauchly as principal consultant. As the project progressed its aims broadened, so that the ENIAC, as it became known, turned out to be much more a general-purpose device than had been originally contemplated, and although programs were represented by plugged interconnecting wires, it provided full conditional branching facilities.It was an incredibly ambitious machine incorporating over 19 000 valves and consuming approximately 200 kilowatts of electric power! (The number of valves largely resulted from the use of them for high speed storage, and the choice of number representation, which can best be described as â€Å"unary-coded decimal. â€Å") The ENIAC incorporated 20 10-digit accumulators, which could be used for addition and subtraction, and for the temporary storage of numbers, a multiplier and a combination divider and square rooter.Addition took 200 microseconds, and multiplication of two 10-digit numbers approximat ely 3 milliseconds. Storage was provided for approximately 300 numerical constants in function tables, which could be set up by manual switches prior to commencing a computation. Input and output was via punched cards, using standard IBM devices. Early in its career the method of programming the machine was modified so that the program was represented by settings of the function tables without the need for changing the interconnecting cables.

‘Nazi Consolidation of Power in 1933 Was Primarily Due to the Use of Terror and Violence.’ How Far Do You Agree with This Judgement?

‘Nazi consolidation of power in 1933 was primarily due to the use of terror and violence. ’ How far do you agree with this judgement? The Nazi Party’s rise was to an extent due to the use of terror and violence, however there were limitations with this as the party was not strong enough to exert this. Their consolidation of power in 1933 was also enabled by their means of legality, and Hitler becoming Chancellor in January 1933.This rise to power was viable due to numerous factors; Hitler’s own tactical manoeuvring of the Reichstag, Germany’s growing economic downfall, Germany changed political landscape and in according to the title, terror and violence caused by the SA. They were the reason the Nazi party were often referred to as a party with the backbone of thugs and forcefulness. The origins of the Nazi party aimed to support German’s working classes to gain equality with the rest of Germany; they were originally more lenient to the left wing of the political spectrum.Its members mainly came from military decent; all against the Treaty of Versailles and the newly establish Weimar Republic. Early on in 1923 they arranged the Munich Putsch, this was an attempt to gain power over Bavaria, with a significant failure. It is evident that prior to 1933, the Nazi’s were all for utilising terror and violence if it benefitted them. Hitler as a result was arrested and imprisoned, the Nazi party’s developments ceased; here Hitler formed his enduring political testament that would source his beliefs for his future career.This start for the Nazi party was always headed off and suppressed by the powers within the Reichstag so; it could be seen as an early failure for Hitler. However their actions brought the party to the public eye and as a result in the 1924 election the Nazi party gained 6. 5% of elections to the Reichstag, this was not a significant enough amount, but it was a start. Most Germans were fearful of C ommunism; this allowed Nazis to consolidate more power through means of terror.On the other hand the Nazi party’s rule of legality and the risk of communism are, to an extent, underlining most vital aspect of explaining how the Nazis were able to destroy political opposition and become dominant and consolidating power in 1933. Legality gave way to a policy where Hitler’s objective was to legally consolidate power which was appropriate and pleased the German people. Hitler and the Nazi's ability to implement terror and violence were later on secured legally. Which, though arguably corrupt, were still technically legal; the enabling act being an xample permitted the Nazis to do such, without being held legally liable, as it was made legal through Hitler and the act. The Nazis consolidation was further developed by the party’s ability to rearrange its organisation to appeal to an extensive range of citizens, and making alliances with other parties to gain seats in the Reichstag. Hitler introduced the DAP 25 point programme, this interested and array of people on either side of the political spectrum and gave the Nazi party more publicity.Furthermore, the formation of the Nazi professional body enabled skilled workers such as doctors to help spread propaganda at elections. These skilled personnel were deeply trusted and respected in society, so they helped to bring the Nazis to power in 1933. In 1932 the Nazi percentage of the vote increased to 37. 3% translated in 230 seats, making them the largest party in the Reichstag. It was attractive as an ally due to its mass movement and broad base support; largely made up of the middle class voting in complaint against the let-downs of the Weimar Republic and the political system itself.The Nazi party had unique system. However, the Nazi party failed to reach everyone; industrial workers who supported the DNVP, along with urban areas who made up 54. 3% of the vote. Terror and violence were prominent factor in consolidating power for the Nazi’s in 1933, for the reason that the violence and a significant impact on political development; the negotiations between Hitler, von Papen and Hindenburg took place against the backdrop of well publicised acts of SA brutality.May 1933 saw the SA attack the trade union headquarters and disbanded it; this violence resulted in many of the SPD leaders fleeing abroad, by June the party was officially banned. Within Germany’s politically important middle class, the violence and thuggery of elements of the Nazi movement caused deep concern. The Nazis tried to balance their use of violence by attempting to ensure that the consolidation of power had the veneer of legality. The Nazi leaders were pragmatic in their understanding that their revolution had to achieve by legal means for it to be acceptable to the vast majority of the German population.Propaganda was another important tool for the consolidation of power. Goebbels was one of o nly three Nazis in the first of Hitler’s cabinets. He was responsible for the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda which was established in March 1933. Hitler and Goebbels both understood that propaganda was essential to the establishment of the Nazi government. Indeed, the very phrase ‘legal revolution’ is an example of Nazi propaganda as it emphasises one aspect of the Nazi take over whilst simultaneously playing down others. Cinema was of prime importance. 933 saw the release of Hitlerjunge Quex a cinematic representation of the death of a blue eyed and blond haired boy at the hand of the Communists. This emphasised the evil of the Communists who had received a legal and carnal beating in the early stages of the Nazi government; thus encouraging public sentiment helpful to the consolidation of the regime. Propaganda also emphasised Hitler as the embodiment of the Nation. Several of their posters stressed and emphasised that the Nazi revolution was for the good of the nation as a whole and went beyond ordinary politics.In this sense it justified the legally dubious aspects of Nazi consolidation by appealing to the national interest which was perceived as higher than any written law. The Reichstag fire provided opportunity for the Nazi’s to legally consolidate their power; crucial to the seizure of power was the issuing of the emergency decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ on 28th February. The rights of freedom of speech, a free press and freedom of assembly enshrined in the Weimar constitution were suspended.Immediately Goebbels ensured that the Nazi propaganda portrayed the decree as a necessary step in the battle against communism; for that reason, it was wildly welcomed. This shows that Nazi were keen to ensure there was legal front to their activities despite the fact that in reality the decree signalled the collapse of the rule of law; although it undermined the constitution, the decree was broadly welcomed, such was the fear of a communist regime. Hitler’s presentation of the Enabling Act to an intimidated Reichstag saw an increase to the Nazi seizure of power.By terms of the Act, Hitler was granted four years of power as a dictator, though this appeared to be legal, the communist deputies were barred from the Reichstag and Goring, as speaker, reduced the required number of votes needed from 432 to 378. The Enabling Act was passed by 444 votes to 94; democracy in Germany had been killed off and the Reichstag’s power and influence removed. The Weimar constitution was dead; support for the Nazi proposal came from a wide cross-section of the country’s political elite.As part of the consolidation of Nazi power, Hitler attempted to control all aspects of German political and social life under Nazi control. The aftermath of the Enabling act was the destruction of the local state government; new state governors, Reichsstatthalter, were appointed with fu ll powers to introduce Nazi policies. By the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933, Jews and political opponents were thrown out of the civil service.Trade union organisations were disbanded and its assets seized the German Labour Front (DAF) was established in its stead; similarly, professional groups lost their independent organisations and were forced to join Nazi bodies. On the 14 July, the Nazi party was declared the only legal political party in Germany, the centralisation of the state was completed in January by the abolition of the upper house of the Reichstag, the Reichsrat, because they still had the power to vote down new Nazi laws. Little by little, the Nazi infiltrated every aspect of the state and forged it into and authoritarian regime.To conclude, it is certain that terror and violence was an integral party of the Nazis consolidation of power, as violence was an important aspect of Nazism and never strayed too far from the surface. However, there were other factors that worked symbiotically towards the Nazis seizure of power, their policy of legality, alliances formed with parties and well implemented propaganda all aided in the Nazi consolidation of power. The Nazi used legal revolutions and arranged propaganda successfully as a means to misleading the nation of their real objectives and significances of their deeds, which ultimately led to their consolidation of power.