Harvard Mark II (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Harvard Mark II was an electromechanical computer built at Harvard University under the direction of Howard Aiken and was finished in 1947. It was financed by the United States Navy. The Mark II was constructed with high-speed electromagnetic relays instead of electro-mechanical counters used in the Mark I, making it much faster than its predecessor. Its addition time was 125,000 microseconds and the multiplication time was 750,000 microseconds (this was a factor of 2.6 and a factor 8 faster, respectively, compared to the Mark I). It was the second machine (after the Bell Labs Relay Calculator) to have floating-point hardware. A unique feature of the Mark II is that it had built-in hardware for several functions such as the reciprocal, square root, logarithm, exponential, and some trigonometric functions. These took between five and twelve seconds to execute.