ine would be electromechanical. Because IBM was such a power in the market, with lots of money and resources, Aiken worked out a proposal and approached Thomas Watson. Watson approved the deal and give him 1 million dollars in which to make this new machine, which would later be called the Harvard Mark I, which began the modern era of computers. Nothing close to the Mark I had ever been built previously. It was 55 feet long and 8 feet high, and when it processed information, it made a clicking sound, equivalent to (according to one person) a room full of individuals knitting with metal needles. Released in 1944, the sight of the Mark I was marked by the presence of many uniformed Navy officers. It was now W.W.II and Aiken had become a naval lieutenant, released to Harvard to help build the computer that was supposed to solve the Navy’s obstacles. During the war, German scientists made impressive advances in computer design. In 1940 they even made a formal development proposal to Hitler, who rejected farther work on the scheme, thinking the war was already won. In Britain however, scientists succeeded in making a computer called Colossus, which helped in cracking supposedly unbreakable German radio codes. The Nazis unsuspectingly continued to use these codes throughout the war. As great as this accomplishment is, imagine the possibilities if the reverse had come true, and the Nazis had the computer technology and the British did not. In the same time frame, American military officers approached Dr. Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and asked him to develop a machine that would quickly calculate the trajectories for artillery and missiles. Mauchly and his student, Presper Eckert, relied on the work of Dr. John Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State Universi...
