Scientific computing/History

Early to mid 20th century scientific computing was performed by human "computers" sometimes assisted by calculating machines, differential analysers, or punch card tabulating machines. Electronic digital computers became available starting in 1946 with ENIAC and by 1953 at least two dozen major computers had been under construction. The first mass-produced computer with floating point hardware, the IBM 704, was introduced in 1954. The FORTRAN progamming language was created a short time later to produce efficient code with less effort by the programmer. High speed computing systems, some employing concurrent operation, developed rapidly during the next decade with notable examples such as the CDC 6600 and ILLIAC IV. By the late 1960s a diverse variety of these specialized systems for scientific computing became known as supercomputers.

In 1974 the commercial vector processor supercomputer CDC STAR-100 was introduced.