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Howard aiken invention computer

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Biography

Howard Aiken's parents were Daniel H Aiken (born about 1870) and Margaret Emily Mierisch (1874-1961). Daniel Aiken came from a wealthy Indiana family but, sadly, he was addicted to alcohol and this led to the family problems that we describe below. Margaret Mierisch was the daughter of German immigrants who had settled in the United States. Daniel and Margaret Aiken were married on 16 May 1899 in Manhattan. Their only child was Howard Aiken, the subject of this biography. The family lived in Hoboken until around 1911 when Howard, his parents and his maternal grandparents all moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. There he attended Arsenal Technical High School which was founded in 1912. This school is so named because the buildings were originally a U.S. Government arsenal but, when they became obsolete for that purpose, they were converted into the third public high school in Indianapolis.

Now Aiken's time at the Arsenal Technical High School was soon interrupted. His father had, as we mentioned above, a drink problem and when drunk he would abuse Margaret, Aiken's mothe
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Howard Aiken

Biography of Howard Aiken, a major figure of the early digital era, by a major historian of science who was also a colleague of Aiken's at Harvard.

Howard Hathaway Aiken (1900-1973) was a major figure of the early digital era. He is best known for his first machine, the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator or Harvard Mark I, conceived in 1937 and put into operation in 1944. But he also made significant contributions to the development of applications for the new machines and to the creation of a university curriculum for computer science.

This biography of Aiken, by a major historian of science who was also a colleague of Aiken's at Harvard, offers a clear and often entertaining introduction to Aiken and his times. Aiken's Mark I was the most intensely used of the early large-scale, general-purpose automatic digital computers, and it had a significant impact on the machines that followed. Aiken also proselytized for the computer among scientists, scholars, and businesspeople and explored novel applications in data processing, automatic billing, and product

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Howard H. Aiken

American physicist

Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900 – March 14, 1973) was an American physicist and a pioneer in computing. He was the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I, the United States' first programmablecomputer.[1][2]

Biography

Aiken was born on 8 March 1900, in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Daniel Aiken, who came from a wealthy and established Indiana family, and Margaret Emily Mierisch, whose parents were German immigrants.[3] He grew up in Indianapolis where he graduated from Arsenal Technical High School in 1919.[4] Aiken studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he received his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1923. He later obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Harvard University in 1937 and 1939, respectively.[4] During this time, he encountered differential equations that he could only solve numerically. Inspired by Charles Babbage's difference engine, he envisioned an electro-mechanical computing device that could do much of the tedious w

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