The General-Purpose Computing Era Began 75 Years Ago with the ENIAC
canopic jug writes:
Monday is the 75th annivesary of the introduction of the ENIAC, which is regarded the first general-purpose, fully electronic computer. The original six programmers, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances "Betty" Snyder Holberton, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence worked with a physical interface of switches and wires to implement programs they designed on paper. The process of rewiring the machine could take days. The purpose was mainly to calculate ballistic tables.
On February 15, 1946, the Army revealed the existence of ENIAC to the public. In a special ceremony, the Army introduced ENIAC and its hardware inventors Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The presentation featured its trajectory ballistics program, operating at a speed thousands of time faster than any prior calculations. The ENIAC women's program worked perfectly - and conveyed the immense calculating power of ENIAC and its ability to tackle the millennium problems that had previously taken a man 100 years to do. It calculated the trajectory of a shell that took 30 seconds to trace it. But, it took ENIAC only 20 seconds to calculate it - faster than a speeding bullet! Indeed!
Work on constructing the ENIAC went from 1943 to 1946.
When the United States entered World War II, the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania undertook the building of an electronic computing machine for the Ballistic Research Laboratory. The principal designers were J. Presper Eckert, an electrical engineer at the Moore School, and John Mauchly, a physicist who had become interested in calculating devices from his efforts to apply statistical methods to meteorological data. Eckert and Mauchly designed the machine to compute ballistic tables, but recognized that it could be applied to a very wide range of problems.
ENIAC contained 20 electronic accumulators, each of which could store a 10-digit decimal number. Its logic circuits were also electronic. The sequence of operations was set by the placement of patchcords in plugboards. ENIAC also had read-only memory of about 300 numbers, which were entered by turning switches. An IBM card reader and an IBM cardpunch provided input and output. All together there were 18,000 tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1500 relays, and 6000 manual switches. This equipment consumed 140 kW of power and filled a room 20 feet by 40 feet.
Previously:
(2017) Software Engineers Are the Heroes of New Computer History Museum Exhibit
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