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process large numbers in a competition to calculate the 1890 U.S. Census. The winner of the competition was Herman Hollerith, whose electrically powered calculator was a monster device that not only processed numbers but displayed the progress of the process on large clocks for all to see. He was so successful that the large railroad companies hired him to process their numbers. By the turn of the century his company, the Computing Tabulating and Recording Company, had become the single largest developer of automatic calculating machines. By 1929, when Hollerith died, his company had become the automation conglomerate, IBM. Right about the time of Hollerith's death, a German engineer named Konrad Zuse approached some of the same challenges that had confronted Charles Babbage a hundred years earlier: how to build his own version of a universal computing machine that could reconfigure itself depending upon the type of calculation the operator wanted to perform. Zuse decided that instead of working with a machine that operated on the decimal system, which limited the types of arithmetic calculations it could perform, his machine would use only two numbers, 0 and 1, the binary system. This meant that he could process any type of mathematical equation through the opening or closing of a series of electromagnetic relays, switches that would act as valves or gates either letting Current through or shutting it off. These relays were the same types of devices that the large telephone companies, like the Bell system in the United States, were using as the basis of their networks. By marrying an electrical power supply and electric switches to the architecture of Babbage's Analytical Engine and basing his computations in a binary instead of a decimal system, Zuse had come up with the European version of the first electrical digital computer, an entirely new device. It was just three years before the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War Il. In the United States at about the same time as Zuse was assembling his first computer in his parents’ living room, Harvard mathematics professor Howard Aiken was trying to reconstruct a theoretical version of Babbage's computer, also using electromagnetic relays as switching devices and relying on a binary number system. The difference between Aiken and Zuse was that Aiken had academic credentials and his background as an innovative mathematician got him into the office of Thomas Watson, president of IBM, to whom he presented his proposal for the first American digital computer. Watson was impressed, authorized a budget for $1 million, and, tight before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the project design was started up at Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was then moved to IBM headquarters in New York during the war. Because of their theoretical ability to calculate large sets of numbers in a relatively short period of time, digital computers were drafted into the war effort in the United Kingdom as a code breaking device. By 1943, at the same time that IBM's first shiny stainless steel version of Aiken's computer was up and running in Endicott, New York, the British were using their dedicated crypto analytical Colossus computer to break the German codes and decipher the code creating ability of the German Enigma - the code machine that the Nazis believed made their transmissions indecipherable to the Allies. Unlike the IBM-Aiken computer at Harvard and Konrad Zuse's experimental computer in Berlin, the Colossus used radio vacuum tubes as relay switches and was, therefore, hundreds of times faster than any experimental computer using electromagnetic relays. The Colossus, therefore, was a true breakthrough because it married the speed of vacuum tube technology with the component design of the Analytical Engine to create the first modern era digital computer. The British used the Colossus so effectively that they quickly felt the need to build more of them to process the increasingly large volume of encrypted transmissions the Germans were sending, ignorant of the fact that the Allies were decoding every word and outsmarting them at every turn. | would argue even to this day that the technological advantage the Allies enjoyed in intelligence gathering apparatus, specifically code breaking computers and radar, enabled us to win the war despite Hitler's initial successes and his early weapon advantages. The Allies’ use of the digital computer in World War Il was an example of how a superior technological advantage can make the difference between victory and defeat no matter what kinds of weapons or numbers of troops the enemy is able to deploy. The American and British experience with computers during the war and our government's commitment to developing a viable digital computer led to the creation, in the years immediately following the war, of a computer called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, or ENIAC. ENIAC was the brain child of Howard Aiken and one of our Army R&D brain trust advisers, the mathematician John von Neumann. Although it operated on a decimal instead of a binary system and had a very small memory, it relied on radio vacuum tube switching technology. For its time it was the first of what today are called "number crunchers. " When measured against the way computers developed over the years since its first installation, especially the personal computers of today, ENIAC was something of a real dinosaur. It was loud, hot, cumbersome, fitful, and required the power supply of an entire town to keep it going. It couldn't stay up for very long because the radio tubes, always unreliable even under the best working conditions, would blow out after only a few hours' work and had to be replaced. But the machine worked, it crunched the numbers it was fed, and it showed the way for the next model, which reflected the sophisticated symbolic architectural design of John von Neumann. von Neumann suggested that instead of feeding the computer the programs you wanted it to run every time you turned it on, the programs themselves could be stored in the computer permanently. By treating the programs themselves as components of the machine, stored right in the hardware, the computer could change 71