Computers are older than we are.

In terms of electrical hardware, computers have been around since the mid-1940’s. They were only powerful enough to calculate single simple equations back then. The very first computer ever invented took up an entire room, and it was called “ENIAC”, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. It was composed of 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 tons, was roughly 8 feet by 3 feet by 100 feet, took up 1800 square feet, and consumed 150 kW of power. It presented the results on punch cards which, when all compiled, relayed the information to the user.

The next generation of computer was the UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer). There were actually a number of different models of UNIVAC. The memory was composed of large tanks filled with liquid mercury (Delay Line Memory), which is the earliest known memory, which transmitted sound signal well and could be used as a temporary storage. The first UNIVAC, UNIVAC I, was created on March 31, 1951, and had 1000 words, arranged in 12 numerical characters for each Delay Memory Line. UNIVAC II, which was created in 1958, used non-mercury filled magnetic core memory which had 2000 to 10000 words, and was fully compatible with the UNIVAC I. UNIVAC III, which was created in 1962, was a binary computer and was backwards compatible with the UNIVAC I and II.

This was the last of the original UNIVACs.

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