Despite its relation to early mechanical calculating devices, the modern computer is often credited with first being conceived by Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, in the 1830s. The calculating machine he designed was never successfully built in his lifetime, however. Approximately a century after Babbage's attempts, the first general-purpose analog computer was constructed by Vannevar Bush, an American physicist and engineer, who called his invention a differential analyzer. The earliest known semielectronic digital calculating machine appeared shortly thereafter in 1939, the same year that Howard Aiken of Harvard University began developing the Mark I calculator, a pioneering fully automatic device. The subsequent decade saw the completion of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC), which is recognized as the first all-electronic universal digital computing device. Built by and for the United States Army, ENIAC was a behemoth compared to modern machines, containing more than 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing approximately 30 tons, and occupying a large room. The Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), which was a successor of ENIAC built by the same team, became the first computer sold for commercial use and utilized a metal tape input system rather than the punch card system of earlier machines.
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