World's First Computer

In 1946 the first computer was announced. It was called ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. ENIAC took up a large room and required several people to operate. She operated with vacuum tubes and could output 5,000 addition problems in one second. The computer used 170,000 watts of power, weighed 28 tons, had 17,840 vacuum tubes, filled a large building and cost $487,000.
(By today's standards, that is about ten million dollars!) It took several people to run her. It was basically a larger super-fast calculator with some input features via punch cards. ENIAC required constant maintain as there was always a tube going out. On average, one would go out about every other day. It took about fifteen minutes to locate the bad tube. It's longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours. Aside from the 17,480 vacuum tubes, ENIAC had 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. The typical computer you use today is of course tens of thousands of times faster.

ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army, Ordnance Corps, Research and Development Command, led by Major General Gladeon M. Barnes. The total cost was about $487,000, equivalent to $7,195,000 in 2019. The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943; work on the computer began in secret at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering the following month, under the code name "Project PX", with John Grist Brainerd as principal investigator. Herman H. Goldstine persuaded the Army to fund the project, which put him in charge to oversee it for them.

Watch a Video Of The ENIAC And How 

Computer Technology Has Advanced Since
That Time

Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory),its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon

ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946 and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press. It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines

Programming

ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, including loops, branches, and subroutines. However, instead of the stored-program computers that exist today, ENIAC was just a large collection of arithmetic machines, which originally had programs set up into the machine by a combination of plugboard wiring and three portable function tables (containing 1200 ten-way switches each). The task of taking a problem and mapping it onto the machine was complex, and usually took weeks. Due to the complexity of mapping programs onto the machine, programs were only changed after huge numbers of tests of the current program. Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman were the first programmers of the ENIAC.

Main ENIAC parts

The main parts were 40 panels and three portable function tables (named A, B, and C). The layout of the panels was (clockwise, starting with the left wall): 

Left wall

• Initiating Unit
• Cycling Unit
• Master Programmer - panel 1 and 2
• Function Table 1 - panel 1 and 2
• Accumulator 1
• Accumulator 2
• Divider and Square Rooter
• Accumulator 3
• Accumulator 4
• Accumulator 5
• Accumulator 6
• Accumulator 7
• Accumulator 9 

Back wall

• Accumulator 10
• High-speed Multiplier - panel 1, 2, and 3
• Accumulator 11
• Accumulator 12
• Accumulator 13
• Accumulator 14

Right wall

• Accumulator 15
• Accumulator 16
• Accumulator 17
• Accumulator 18
• Function Table 2 - panel 1 and 2
• Function Table 3 - panel 1 and 2
• Accumulator 19
• Accumulator 20
• Constant Transmitter - panel 1, 2, and 3
• Printer - panel 1, 2, and 3

An IBM card reader was attached to Constant Transmitter panel 3 and an IBM card punch was attached to Printer Panel 2. The Portable Function Tables could be connected to Function Table 1, 2, and 3.

 

Recognition

ENIAC was named an IEEE Milestone in 1987.

In 1996, in honor of the ENIAC's 50th anniversary, The University of Pennsylvania sponsored a project named, "ENIAC-on-a-Chip", where a very small silicon computer chip measuring 7.44 mm by 5.29 mm was built with the same functionality as ENIAC. Although this 20 MHz chip was many times faster than ENIAC, it had but a fraction of the speed of its contemporary microprocessors in the late 1990s^.

In 1997, the six women who did most of the programming of ENIAC were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of FameThe role of the ENIAC programmers is treated in a 2010 documentary film titled Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII by LeAnn Erickson. A 2014 documentary short, The Computers by Kate McMahon, tells of the story of the six programmers; this was the result of 20 years' research by Kathryn Kleiman and her team as part of the ENIAC Programmers Project.         

In 2011, in honor of the 65th anniversary of the ENIAC's unveiling, the city of Philadelphia declared February 15 as ENIAC Day.

The ENIAC celebrated its 70th anniversary on February 15, 2016.

MOHAMED NAVEED