ELECTRONIC AGE

(1930s to 1980s)

We saw last time how the first generation of digital computers were built around the first generation
of automatic electrical switch, the electromagnetic relay. But by the time those computers were built,
another digital switch was already waiting in the wings. Whereas the relay was an electromechanical
device because it used electricity to control a mechanical switch, this new class of digital switches
was electronic founded on the new science of the electron, a science born around the turn of the
twentieth century. This science concretized the carrier of electrical force as not a current, wave, or
field, but as a solid particle.

EXAMPLE FORMS OF MEDIA:

ENIGMA (1919)

The enigma machine is an encryption device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to
protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi
Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military.

EDSAC (1949)

The Electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by
John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, the machine was constructed by
Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England.

HEWLETT PACKARD 9100A (1968)

Is an early programmable calculator or cumputer, first appearing in 1968. HP called it a desktop

calculator because, as Bill Hewlett said, “If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected
by our customers computer gurus because it didnt look like an IBM.