The first real advance toward modern computing came in 1994 when a joint project headed by Howard Aiken and involving IBM, the U.S. War Department, and Harvard University resulted in a machine called the Mark I. This machine, the first automatic calculator, consisted of seventy-eight accounting machines. It could store seventy-two words, perform three additions a second, and multiply two ten-place numbers in three seconds. The U.S. Navy used it to design weapons and calculate trajectories (the curved paths of cannon shells) until the end of World War II. The Mark I was controlled by paper tapes and presented results on punched cards. Instead of relying on mechanical gears, the Mark I used electromagnetic relays and mechanical counters.