ENIAC THE FIRST ELECTRONIC COMPUTER

The name ENIAC is an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. The proposal for the first electronic computer came from a group headed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania. As original conceived, the ENIAC was to be a general-purpose computer. The US Army subsidized it. The most radical features of the propose computer was the use of 18,000 vacuum tubes in its circuitry [some expert were convinced that, because vacuum tubes were not sufficiently reliable, any computer with such a large number of them would unworkable]. The ENIAC also contained 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitor, and 7,500 switches. It weighed 30 tons and occupied the entire 15,000 square feet of the Moore School’s basement laboratory. On its test run in February 1946, the ENIAC took only two to solve a nuclear physics problem that would have previously have required 100 years of calculation by a physicist. The ENIAC’S speed of calculation was a thousand times faster than the best mechanical calculators. Although with in a few years Maunchly and Eckert produced a computer that could outperform it, the ENIAC continued in operation until October 1995, when it was disassemble.