Popular Science News – Computer History can be best shown by five computers which have, in their time, made a mark on the history of computers.
Colossus (1943) was use for code breaking during WW2 and was the first programmable computer, although it had no memory. Harwell Dekatron (1951) was at the time a 2.5 ton ‘pocket’ calculator which has just been in the news because it has been refurbished and rebooted. Cray-1 (1976) was the first of a set of record breaking computers and cost $25m. It was used to model nuclear weapon explosions rather than actually exploding them. Deep Blue (1996) is famous for beating world chess champion Garry Kasparov at a game of chess, although he won overall in the competition against the computer. Watson (2011) was created by IBM in order to beat human intelligence. To prove this they set the computer up against two experienced veterans of the US game show Jeopardy and with the help of its encyclopaedic memory, including Wikipedia, it won of course. What is sad was that IBM thought that winning a game of Jeopardy was the pinnacle of human intelligence.
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