What was the first commercially-produced computer?

Answer 1

Herman Hollerith was a German-American statistician and engineer, who designed a mechanical tabulation device that rapidly tallied up statistics from millions of pieces of data. In 1889, Hollerith was issued a U.S. Patent for what we commonly call today "punch card" technology... electro-mechanical counters that recorded data by reading holes or combinations of holes and tallying that data. When Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company that he launched in 1896 won the contract to build these machines for the U.S. Census Bureau's 1890 census, Hollerith's technology reduced the tabulation time from 8 years (1880 census) to 1 year (1890 census). Tabulating Machine Company had accidentally become the first OEM, ISV, MSP, and integrator... all rolled into one.

Answer 2

The information below comes from www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions: "The first such desktop-size system specifically designed for personal use appeared in 1974; it was offered by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS). The owners of the system were then encouraged by the editor of a popular technology magazine to create and sell a mail-order computer kit through the magazine. The computer, which was called Altair, retailed for slightly less than $400."

Answer 3

The first I became aware of was the MITS Altair 8800, sold as a kit in 1974. From the factory it came with 256 bytes of SRAM expandable on board to 1K bytes and no I/O devices. The product eventually bankrupted MITS. The backplane (no motherboard) provided in the factory kit only had 4 slots, 3 of which were occupied:

1. Front panel
2. CPU
3. SRAM
4. spare

Most users soon populated that spare slot with a UART card with 20mA teletype drivers and receivers (home built or third party) so they could connect a surplus teletype for real I/O. Third party suppliers soon took over making full sized backplanes, 4K & 16K DRAM boards, and dozens of different I/O cards.

Bill Gates dropped out to start his own software company and develop his BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800, as it needed 4K bytes minimum to run, this was the first instance of his software exceeding the size of then available microcomputer memory (and it wasn't the last).

Answer 4

The BINary Automatic Computer (BINAC) was produced in 1949 for Northrop Aircraft Company by Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC). It was a one of a kind machine and although it passed its acceptance test at the factory, Northrop claimed it never functioned right for them. Their problems were likely due to the fact they they installed it in an area of their facility that did classified work and nobody at EMCC had a clearance so instead Northrop had an inexperienced electronics engineer that had just graduated do the assembly on site.

Answer 5

The first commercially produced computer was the UNIVAC I, a vacuum tube computer designed in 1951. UNIVAC stands for Universal Automatic Computer.

Answer 6

analog mechanical ones, these go back to 100BC.

Answer 7

Remington Rand Corporation produced the first commercial computer, the UNIVAC, in 1951.

Answer 8

Either UNIVAC I or LEO, not sure. I suggest you look them up on Wikipedia, which came first.