云南大学软件学院transcript3.pdf

Creation of the Computer 3

After the success of UNIVAC, various companies began to see a future in computer devnd by the beginning of 1960s, the company's large mainframe
computers, dominated the business. But the development of the computer was about to go in an
altogether different choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the others things not because they are easy, but
because they are hard. In 1961, America was trailing Russia in the race for space. 1961, a year of
achievements for Soviet scientists in the race for space. Yuri Gagarin, has become the first human to
orbit the earth. And crowds in Moscow's Red Square salute the 27 year old cosmonaut. As NASA
engineers began planning the lunar mission, they realized a computer as powerful as one currently
the size of a room must be on board. The engineers wondered, is such a small computer even
possible.
The first great break through that would lead to computer miniaturization had already been made
on December 23rd, 1947 when three scientists at Bell labs, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and
John Bardeen invented the transistor. Formed on the semiconductor silicon, the transistor could
replace large vacuum tubes in computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors were tiny,
required little power and produced