"World's Greatest Mathematical Calculator"
Press release
By: Harvard University
Date: August 7, 1944
Source: News Office, Harvard University. "World's Greatest Mathematical Calculator." August 7, 1944. Reprinted in Cohen, Bernard et al., Makin' Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Appendix A, 249–252.
About the Author: Howard Aiken (1900–1973), born in Hoboken, New Jersey, received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1923. Following ten years of work as an engineer for public utilities, he enrolled at Harvard for graduate studies, where he earned his doctorate in physics in 1939. He then began a five-year project, working with engineers at the International Business Machines laboratory, to design and build a large-scale calculator. The machine they constructed is considered to mark the beginning of the computer era. Aiken...
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1940's Science and Technology Primary Sources
The 1940's: Primary Sources
