electronic computer
NAME: Electronic computer
OTHER-NAME: ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)
DATE INVENTED/BEGAN: 14 February 1946
PLACE INVENTED/BEGAN: Philadelphia, PA
DATE ENDED:
PLACE ENDED:
CATEGORY: Technology
DISCIPLINE: Invention
ASSESSMENT: Major cultural and scientific development
LANGUAGE: English
DETAILS:
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was the first large electronic digital computer and was designed by the American engineers John Mauchly* and J Presper Eckert*.
ENIAC went into operation at the Moore School of Engineering at Pennsylvania University in Philadelphia, PA on February 14th 1946.
ENIAC used 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet (167 square meters) of floor space, weighed 30 tons, and used 160 kilowatts of electrical power. The machine filled an entire floor of the building and the myth grew that when it was switched on, the lights of Philadelphia dimmed.
At the ENIAC sped up calculation of a shell trajectory (the main purpose for which it was designed) from 20 hrs to 30 secs (ENIAC could perform calculation of 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications and 38 divisions in one second).
This was accomplished by using the vacuum tubes to store numbers. A tube was either on or off. The tubes were set in 20 decades (1-9). So if the fifth tube of the first decade was on and all others were off, the machine was storing ‘5.’
In this way calculations could be performed as if the machine were an electronic abacus, because each set of number-decade tubes was linked to an ‘accumulator’ which held the ‘sum’ represented in the decade tubes. This could interact with the next accumulator, and so on.
Accumulators were ‘programmed’ to interact in different ways depending on the kind of calculation to be performed. Programming was laborious, involving throwing thousands of switches and plugging cables. But once set up, the calculation was done at electronic speed.
ONELINER: The first electronic computer
EXTRA-CONNECTIONS: None
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
EB
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