Howard Aiken was born on March 9, 1900 in Hoboken, New Jersey. He studied at the University of Wisconsin Madison and received his doctorate from Harvard in1939. He made plans to build a large computer while he was a graduate student and an instructor in the Department of Physics at Harvard. After he made a deal with IBM, he worked on his invention at their labs. While working with thee other IBM engineers, he created the ASCC computer (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) in 1943, which could carry out five operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and reference to previous results. Aiken was much influenced by Babbage's writings on the Analytical Machine and the building the ASCC computer as completing the task which Babbage had failed to complete. The ASCC was given to Harvard for use and renamed the Harvard Mark I. The computer was used by the US navy for gunnery and ballistics calculations.

In 1947, Aiken completed the Mark II, a completely electronic computer. He worked at Harvard for five for years. Over that time he created the Mark III and Mark IV. In 1964 Aiken received the Harry M Goode Memorial Award, which is a medal and $2,000 awarded by the Computer Society, for his original contribution to the development of the automatic computer, leading to the first large-scale general purpose automatic digital computer. He also received other awards from other countries including France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Belgium. On March 14, 1973, five days after his birthday, Howard Aiken passed away.

Aiken is important to the computer revolution because he was a great pioneer in the development of computers. His invention, the Mark I, was the first computer ever created and he worked on Colossus, the massive code breaker that was used in WWII. If not for him Babbage's design of the Analytical Engine would not be realized.