Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartim ...

after he became director of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer (RDA) was an all-electronic version of the

Differential Analyzer The differential analyser is a mechanical analogue computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. It was one of the first advanced computing devices to be used operati ...

, which Bush had built at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

between 1928 and 1931. The RDA was operational in 1942, a year after the

Zuse Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program- ...

Z3. It was equipped with 2000 vacuum tubes, weight 100 tons, used 200 miles of wire, 150 motors and thousand of relays. According to historian

Robin Boast Robin Benville Boast (born 2 March 1956) is the Professor Emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies.https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/o/r.boast/r.boast.html University of Amsterdam staff page for Robin Boasthttps://www.to ...

, "the RDA (Rockefeller Differential Analyzer) was revolutionary, and later was considered to be one of the most important calculating machines of the Second World War."The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and Its Consequences, Robin Boast, 2017. p. 85

References

* http://www.eecs.mit.edu/AY95-96/events/bush/photos.html * http://www.vikingwaters.com/htmlpages/MFHistory.htm * http://www.meccano.us/differential_analyzers/other_da/index.html Early computers {{computing-stub