ENIAC
Four ENIAC panels and one of its three function tables, on display at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania
|
|
 Location within Philadelphia
|
|
| Location | University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 39°57′08″N 75°11′28″W / 39.9522012°N 75.1909932°W |
| PA marker dedicated | Thursday, June 15, 2000 |
ENIAC (/ˈini.æk/ or /ˈɛni.æk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was amongst the earliest electronic general-purpose computers made. It was Turing-complete, digital, and could solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.
Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, its first programs included 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 (103) times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike. This combination of speed and programmability allowed for thousands more calculations for problems, as ENIAC calculated a trajectory that took a human 20 hours in 30 seconds (a 2400x increase in speed).
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 $6,740,000 in 2016. 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.
...
Wikipedia