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Eniac: John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert

The ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. It was developed between 1943-1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the U.S. Army and Navy, to calculate artillery firing tables. The massive machine, which filled an entire room, used 17,468 vacuum tubes and consumed 160 kW of power. While slow to reprogram, the ENIAC was able to perform calculations over 1,000 times faster than any other machine and was a breakthrough in computational capability, though it was retired in 1955 after newer computers surpassed its abilities.

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117 views2 pages

Eniac: John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert

The ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. It was developed between 1943-1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the U.S. Army and Navy, to calculate artillery firing tables. The massive machine, which filled an entire room, used 17,468 vacuum tubes and consumed 160 kW of power. While slow to reprogram, the ENIAC was able to perform calculations over 1,000 times faster than any other machine and was a breakthrough in computational capability, though it was retired in 1955 after newer computers surpassed its abilities.

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roswell
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ENIAC

On May 31, 1943, the military commission for the new computer began with the
partnership of John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert. It took the team about one
year to design the ENIAC and then 18 months plus half a million dollars in tax
money to build it. The machine wasn't officially turned on until November 1945,
by which time the war was over. However, not all was lost, and the military still
put ENIAC to work, performing calculations for the design of a hydrogen bomb,
weather predictions, cosmic-ray studies, thermal ignition, random-number
studies, and wind-tunnel design.

In 1946, Mauchly and Eckert developed the Electrical Numerical Integrator and
Calculator (ENIAC). The American military sponsored this research because it
needed a computer for calculating artillery-firing tables, the settings used for
different weapons under varied conditions for target accuracy.

The ENIAC was an intricate and elaborate piece of technology for the time.
Housed within 409-foot-tall cabinets, the machine contained 17,468 vacuum
tubes along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual
switches, and 5 million soldered joints. Its dimensions covered 1,800 square feet
(167 square meters) of floor space and weighed 30 tons, and running it consumed
160 kilowatts of electrical power. Two 20-horsepower blowers delivered cool air
to keep the machine from overheating.

In just one second, the ENIAC (1,000 times faster than any other calculating
machine to date) could perform 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications, or 38
divisions. The use of vacuum tubes instead of switches and relays resulted in the
increase in speed, but it was not a quick machine to reprogram. Programming
changes would take the technician’s weeks, and the machine always required
long hours of maintenance. As a side note, research on the ENIAC led to many
improvements in the vacuum tube.

Despite its significant advances in computation in the 1940s, ENIAC's tenure was
short. On October 2, 1955, at 11:45 p.m., the power was finally shut off, and the
ENIAC was retired

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