Chapter 7
Hardware
“Say -- you must be Harris. I've read every program you've ever written. I'm one of your biggest fans!”
The first fully automatic, sequence-controlled, large-scale calculator was called the Harvard Mark I and was completed in 1944 by Howard Aiken of Harvard University working with engineers from IBM. The completed Mark I was 51 feet long × 8 feet high × 2 feet wide; it weighed 50 tons and had more than 750,000 parts.
Adapted from www.webillustrated.com
Some designers relish opportunities to learn about, work with, and play with computer and electronic hardware. Others deal with hardware as little as possible. Regardless, to create usable software we need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the hardware that facilitates and constrains our designs.
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