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National Geographic

How supercomputers paved the way for laptops and chatbots

EDVAC (1949) At the end of World War II, there was widespread interest in creating the 'universal computer' envisioned by the British scientist Alan Turing. American theorist John von Neumann published a pioneering article in 1946. In it he pointed out that the computer of the future would work with programs stored in the same memory as the data, instead of using an external electronic board for this function. American theorist John von Neumann standing next to Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer, left. Granger/Cordon Press (Oppenheimer: The secrets he protected and the suspicions that followed him.) That same year, the inventors of the ENIAC, Mauchly and Eckert, began the construction of the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). Presented in 1949, it was the second computer of the von Neumann type with memory holding both data and instruction, after the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) was built at the University of Cambridge three months earlier. The EDVAC introduced a new information-storage system: the mercury delay line, a predecessor of the transistor. This made it possible to reduce the use of vacuum tubes, which frequently melted. The EDVAC occupied 490 square feet of surface area. Engineer James H. Pomerene, a computer pioneer, holds a vacuum tube. Getty Images UNIVAC (1951) The EDVAC was used to calculate ballistic trajectories for the military, but its designers were also interested in creating computers for civilian use. In 1946 Eckert and Mauchly won a contract to build a computer for the U.S. Census Bureau, which would replace the tabulating machines used since the late 19th century to summarize information stored on punch cards. Although the duo ran into financial difficulties and their company was acquired by the typewriter manufacturer Remington, in 1951 they introduced the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer). In its electronic circuits, the UNIVAC also used mercury delay lines for memory, which allowed the number of vacuum tubes to be reduced to 5,000.