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The story is told that when ENIAC
was turned on, Philadelphia
experienced an electrical brown-out.
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At last, we come to the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Calculator,
built during the Second World War by
J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly.
ENIAC was the first fully electronic,
Turing Complete computer which could
be reprogrammed by rewiring to solve a
full range of computing problems.
ENIAC was built to generate
ballistic tables for amunition tested
at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Such
tables are essential for artillary
gunners to aim their weapons.
Generating these tables fell to an
army of "computers" -- women who made
calculations using adding machines.
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ENIAC was commissioned in May, 1943
and became formally operational in
February, 1946 -- at a cost of almost
$500,000. Though noted in the press
for its sheer size, in some ways it
was not state-of-the-art even for its
era. Unlike Zuse's Z3, it did not read
programs off paper tape and had to be
rewired for each computational
problem.
Data input was from an IBM card
reader, and output went to an IBM line
printer. Also, unlike most modern
computers, ENIAC's registers performed
decimal arithmetic rather than binary.
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It was BIG, with 17,468 vacuum
tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500
relays, 70,000 resisters, 10,000
capacitors, and around 5 million hand
soldered connections. Several tubes
burned out almost every day, leaving
it non-functional nearly half the
time. In 1954, the longest continuous
period of operation without a failure
was 116 hours -- close to 5 days.
When running, ENIAC could manage 357
multiplications per second. In light
of the technology of the time, these
statistics were not shabby -- though
for its special purpose operation,
Colossus was much faster.
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Today, a 0.02 square inch chip of
silicon can hold the same capacity as
ENIAC, which occupied 400 cubic meters
of space.
On the otherhand, without the
pioneerinig work of Eckert and Mauchly
-- and the genius of all the other
first computer designers -- we
wouldn't have 0.02 square inches of
silicon computing anything!
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1919 - 1995 1907 - 1980
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The Illustrated
History of Computers
Part I
compiled by Dave Moorman
from
Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia
and other sources
Music by Hayden and Mozart
Transcribed by Corky Cochran
Graphics processed using
Adobe PhotoDelux
and
GoDot
Brought to you by
LOADSTAR
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