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

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 ope ...

, which Bush had built at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

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, "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