The first computer bug

In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic". This language eventually became COBOL which was the language most affected by the infamous Y2K problem. A high-level language is designed to be more understandable by humans than is the binary language understood by the computing machinery. A high-level language is worthless without a program -- known as a compiler -- to translate it into the binary language of the computer and hence Grace Hopper also constructed the world's first compiler. Grace remained active as a Rear Admiral in the Navy Reserves until she was 79 (another record).

The Mark I operated on numbers that were 23 digits wide. It could add or subtract two of these numbers in three-tenths of a second, multiply them in four seconds, and divide them in ten seconds. Forty-five years later computers could perform an addition in a billionth of a second! Even though the Mark I had three quarters of a million components, it could only store 72 numbers! Today, home computers can store 30 million numbers in RAM and another 10 billion numbers on their hard disk. Today, a number can be pulled from RAM after a delay of only a few billionths of a second, and from a hard disk after a delay of only a few thousandths of a second. This kind of speed is obviously impossible for a machine which must move a rotating shaft and that is why electronic computers killed off their mechanical predecessors.

On a humorous note, the principal designer of the Mark I, Howard Aiken of Harvard, estimated in 1947 that six electronic digital computers would be sufficient to satisfy the computing needs of the entire United States. IBM had commissioned this study to determine whether it should bother developing this new invention into one of its standard products (up until then computers were one-of-a-kind items built by special arrangement). Aiken's prediction wasn't actually so bad as there were very few institutions (principally, the government and military) that could afford the cost of what was called a computer in 1947. He just didn't foresee the micro-electronics revolution which would allow something like an IBM Stretch computer of 1959: