Computer History 

Computers in the 1950's

 

Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced COMPUTER; the company´s first customer was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Drums REGISTERED information as magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder. Read/write heads both recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.