Computer Software

The first modern computers were developed by the United States military during World War II. Their purpose was to calculate the paths of artillery shells and bombs. By present day standards, these machines were primitive. They used bulky vacuum tubes that were the predecessors of today's electronic circuitry. As a result, the machines were massive, occupying large rooms. Additionally, the myriad of settings were controlled by on-off switches, which had to be reset by hand for each operation. This was time-consuming and difficult for the programmers.

John von Neumann, a Princeton mathematician, suggested that computers would be more efficient if they stored their programs in memory. This would eliminate the need to manually setting every single instruction each time a problem was to be solved. This and other suggestions by von Neumann transformed the computer from a fancy adding machine into a machine capable of simulating many real-life, complex problems.