ENIAC performed ballistics trajectory calculations with 160 kW of power
The US-built ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was
the first electronic general-purpose computer. It combined, for the
first time, the high speed of electronics with the ability to be
programmed for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000
times a second, a thousand times faster than any other machine. It also
had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was
limited to 20 words (about 80 bytes). Built under the direction of
John Mauchly and
J. Presper Eckert at the
University of Pennsylvania,
ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full operation
at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, and
contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes. One of the major engineering feats
was to minimize tube burnout, which was a common problem at that time.
The machine was in almost constant use for the next ten years.
ENIAC was unambiguously a Turing-complete device. It could compute
any problem (that would fit in memory). A "program" on the ENIAC,
however, was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a
far cry from the
stored program electronic machines that came later. Once a program was written, it had to be mechanically set into the machine.
Six women did most of the programming of ENIAC.
(Improvements completed in 1948 made it possible to execute stored
programs set in function table memory, which made programming less a
"one-off" effort, and more systematic).
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